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SPIRITUAL DRAMA 



NATHANIEL WRIGHT STEPHENSON 



THE 

SPIRITUAL DRAMA 

IN THE 

LIFE OF THACKERAY 



BY 

NATHANIEL WRIGHT STEPHENSON 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON 



UK 



HODDER & STOUGHTON 

NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



■5? 



Copyright, 19 13, by 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



AX/' 



TO 
LANCELOT MINOR HARRIS 

A SEARCHING THINKER DELICATELY KEEN 
I SUBMIT THIS ARGUMENT 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Introduction ii 

II Early Life 20 

III Apprenticeship 46 

IV Vanity Fair 72 

V End of the First Manner . . 97 

VI The Turning Point . . . .122 

VII Readjustment 150 

VIII Following "The Newcomes'' . .173 

IX The Final Triumph . . . .180 

Chronology 191 



SPIRITUAL DRAMA 



THE 

SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN THE 

LIFE OF THACKERAY 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

THE prose novel of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, like the poetical drama of the 
Age of Elizabeth, ran a definite 
course. We can put a finger on the time when 
it began; we can trace the curve, so to speak, 
of its development; we are about agreed that 
it has finished. We are again in the position 
of Tennyson in his youth when the world 
stood consciously on a threshold and heard — 

The spirit of the years to come 
Yearning to mix himself with life. 

At such a moment it is profitable to review 
the effort of the preceding age. The next few 
years are likely to see a general settlement of 
opinion — perhaps temporary, perhaps final — 
with regard to the great writers of the age of 



12 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

George IV and Victoria. At least, we shall 
come to a conclusion as to what they signify to 
the century now beginning. We shall decide 
what part of their endeavour we wish to take 
up and carry forward, what part we wish to 
abjure. Every literary epoch becomes, at last, 
a residue of itself that enters as leaven into the 
age beyond. It is well, in the present case, to 
enquire what part of the leaven is good, what 
bad. 

The present essay is a slight contribution to 
such enquiry. I do not aspire to be Thack- 
eray's biographer. Much is still to be said 
and contested ere his life can be properly 
written. What I seek to do is to make plain 
one view of the nature, the evolution, the sig- 
nificance of his work. By way of prelude 
there are certain singularities in his career that 
should be reconsidered. His great fame has 
been achieved slowly; much of it since his 
death. In his own time he was never the 
power that Dickens was. He was keenly sen- 
sible of that fact and it is probable that all his 
life long he looked upon himself as more or 
less a failure. "Nobody reads it," he said 
wearily of his own masterpiece. And yet, to- 
day, nearly half a century after his death, new 
editions of him appear at short intervals. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 13 

His novels have been a battleground. And 
we should note that what people have fought 
over is the view of life which those novels ex- 
press. Dickens has had partisans and detrac- 
tors but their disagreement has been on ques- 
tions of art. Dickens' thinking, so far as it 
goes, is rejected by few. It is the way in 
which the thought is embodied that offends 
some people and delights others. With 
Thackeray, on the other hand, the artistic issue 
is swallowed up in a moral one. Though peo- 
ple have wrangled over his methods, they have 
fought to a finish over his principles. 
j^ Personally, he was one of the kindest, 
gentlest, most lovable of men. He was also 
one of the most unfortunate. No man ever 
had a more sensitive craving for happiness; 
few men have been more closely acquainted 
with sorrow. He was a mixture of splendid 
virtue with engaging weakness. There was 
much in him to move us to tears; nothing to 
arouse our scorn. Allowing for an abnormal 
sensitiveness with which he was cursed by Na- 
ture, he led the life of a hero. Great as are 
his books, his life to the sympathetic observer 
is also great. 

What strikes us at once is the fact that the 
life and the work are uniquely bound together, 



14 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

yet strangely discordant. The more we study 
the books, the more certain we are that almost 
all their material, at bottom, is his own experi- 
ence. But there are things in the life that 
seem at first blush to have had little effect upon 
the work. And these are the noblest things 
the life contained, — constancy, love, unselfish- 
ness, such are the keynotes of Thackeray's life. 
Why is it that we do not think of them as the 
keynotes of his novels? That question must 
be answered as we proceed. ^ 

A word, here, upon the sequence of the 
greater novels. Their order with the years 
that may fairly claim them is as follows: 
Barry Lyndon, 1844; Vanity Fair, 1847; Pen- 
dennis, 1849; Esmond, 1852; The Newcomes, 
1854; The Virginians, 1858; Philip, 1861; 
Denis Duval, 1864. I" the first, an incom- 
parable tour-de-force, we have the worst man 
Thackeray ever drew. Barry Lyndon is a stu- 
pendous image of pure selfishness void of 
scruple. It is repeated with modifications in 
each of those colossal egoists. Lord Steyne, 
Marlborough and Lord Ringwood. Perhaps 
the first question to be reckoned with in an 
estimate of Thackeray is: What is the sig- 
nificance of this procession of colossal egoists? 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 15 

The charge of cynicism is so common in con- 
nection with Thackeray that one prepares at 
once to receive the sneering attack, "See, his 
men of power are all scoundrels." Until we 
reach Denis Duval, in which there is a man 
of power who is not a scoundrel, the sneer may 
be defended. iBut the person who does so con- 
demns himself. He fails in two respects. 
He fails to follow closely Thackeray's thought 
about those men. He fails to enter fully into 
Thackeray's mood as an artist. 

As to the thought, one is almost tempted to 
decline to defend it. Not to perceive his 
burning hatred of such men is to confess one- 
self obtuse. "But yet," the detractor may re- 
ply, "what does that signify? If he hates 
them why does not he make them unsuccess- 
ful? Lyndon and Marlborough, to be sure, 
are ; but Steyne and Ringwood are not." Two 
things are to be said in reply. First, Thack- 
eray tried to be true to life — we shall enquire 
later whether he was — and in life evil is often 
successful. One of the typical features of the 
nineteenth century, a feature never to be for- 
gotten in examining it^was its consciousness 
of successful sin. This is especially true of 
its finest minds. No more significant line was 



16 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

penned in that century than Lowell's "Right 
for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the 
throne." 

Every age has a typical literary motive 
which underlies all its great books. The typ- 
ical motive of the time of Thackeray was the 
conquest of evil over good. Dickens, to be 
sure, broke boldly through such thinking. 
But Dickens, like the greater Browning, was 
not among the writers who are the peculiar 
expression of his time. Rather, he like 
Browning seems a great intruder, a reincar- 
nation of some younger, more trustful age, or 
else the herald of a mightier age to come. We 
smile at his crudities; we may condemn his 
methods; but the heart of man responds stead- 
ily to his exuberant conviction that in the long 
run right will win. If we show him a case in 
which "robber wrong" prevails, he replies, 
"That is an exception," and pounds on fear- 
lessly with his gospel, "Be not afraid." But 
this was not, alas! the mood of his time. The 
typical age of doubt, it dragged its anchors 
and went adrift. The utter hopelessness of 
the novels of Thomas Hardy, their conviction 
that almost nothing on earth goes right, show 
ithe dark last hours of the art that was typical 
of the troubled century. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 17 

One other consideration should be pointed 
out in advance. It is a thoughtless and inat- 
tentive reader, who, after finishing Vanity 
Fair, written mainly in 1847, ^^^ turn to 
The Newcomes which took form in 1854 and 
not perceive immediately that between those 
two books the mood of the author had been 
transformed. In Vanity Fair we are borne 
down by a sense of what might be termed the 
predestination in character; the idea that peo- 
ple are what they are; they will be what they 
will be; nothing can alter their destinies be- 
cause nothing can change their natures. In 
The Newcomes we are freed from this idea. 
The relentlessness of the earlier book has given 
place to the larger faith — 

"I only trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill." 

Midway between these two great novels 
stands the central fact of Thackeray's life as 
an artist, Henry Esmond. It marks the sum- 
mit of a watershed. The pinnacle of his art, 
it is also the culmination, the cessation, of his 
sterner, more hopeless, earlier mood. In it we 
discern the beginnings of the later mood. 
Though the major figures are conceived fatal- 
istically, certain minor figures strike the other 



18 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

note. Naturally, wc look for the explanation 
of this march of mood. Why, at the time of 
Vanity Fair, was Thackeray hopeless and de- 
fiant? Why did he turn the corner in Es- 
mond? How did he work out his salvation 
at the end? These questions also must be an- 
swered as we proceed. 

To recapitulate: in reviewing the proces- 
sion of Thackeray's novels we notice a change 
of attitude on the part of the creator toward 
His creatures. By contrasting the extremes we 
are made aware that the earlier point of view 
was comparatively fatalistic: the later, hope- 
ful. Barry Lyndon in Thackeray's first nov- 
el moves inevitably toward his doom because 
his own nature can never by any possibility be 
reversed. That opening novel is upon the 
wages of sin. So is the second, Vanity Fair. 
Pendennis makes a partial break in the se- 
quence but the true curve is recovered in £5- 
mond where the fatalism of character is made 
appallingly plain. iBut there, also, begins the 
new hopefulness that develops through the 
later books and swings Thackeray round to a 
different point of view. The biographical 
significance of Esmond demands our closest 
attention, because, in writing it Thackeray 
seems to have delivered himself from certain 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 19 

dreadful ideas and with tlie completion of it 
he took a fresh start. When we pass on into 
The Newcomes we find that fatalistic figures 
are in the minority, the fatalistic note is not 
the major one. When Philip is reached we 
have at last a really buoyant note. In Denis 
Duval the sense of fate is hardly felt and it is 
not even suggested that man is not the real 
victor over circumstance. 

In the chapters which follow, though it is 
imperative to give an outline of Thackeray's 
career, it is not in the least my intention to 
plunder those charming prefaces by Mrs. 
Ritchie, which, I trust, her publishers will ere 
long bring out in a single work. Neither do 
I seek to conceal in a different style the recent 
and valuable though somewhat spiteful life by 
Mr. Charles Whibley. My aim is to give 
only so much of the career as is needed to ex- 
plain the novels and to extract from the novels 
their true biographical significance. 



CHAPTER II 

EARLY LIFE 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE 
THACKERAY was born at Cal- 
cutta, July 1 8, 1811. His father 
then was, his grandfather had been, a compe- 
tent civil servant of the East India Company. 
His great-grandfather was Dr. Thomas Thack- 
eray, head master of Harrow, chaplain to 
Prince Frederick and an archdeacon. His 
father's mother was a daughter of Colonel 
Richmond Webb through whom Thackeray 
was remotely related to that picturesque sol- 
dier whose victory of Wynandael plays so 
great a part in Henry Esmond. Thackeray's 
mother was Miss Anne Beecher, who was de- 
scribed in her youth as a reigning beauty in 
the government set at Calcutta. 

Richmond Thackeray, the father of the 
novelist, died in 1816, and in 1817 William 
Makepeace was sent to England. On the way 
his ship touched at St. Helena and his nurse 

took him for a glimpse of the "ogre," who was 

20 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 21 

supposed to eat three sheep a day and all the 
little children he could catch. Arriving in 
England, the child was taken in charge by an 
aunt and was afterward at school in the same 
locality which he has immortalised with Miss 
Pinkerton's Academy. But the significant 
part of his boyhood seems to attach to that fa- 
mous old Charterhouse School which all the 
heroes of his novels have attended. Thack- 
eray entered Charterhouse in 1822 and re- 
mained there till 1828. As a schoolboy he is 
thus described by his school-mate, George 
Venables: 

*'My recollection of him, though fresh 
enough, does not furnish much material for 
biography. He came to school young — a 
pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy. I think 
his experience there was not generally pleas- 
ant. Though he had afterwards a scholarlike 
knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinc- 
tion in the school; and I should think that 
the character of the head-master. Dr. Russell, 
which was vigorous, unsympathetic, and stern, 
though not severe, was uncongenial to his own. 
With the boys who knew him, Thackeray was 
popular; but he had no skill in games, and, I 
think, no taste for them. . . . HE WAS AL- 
READY KNOWN BY HIS FACULTY 



22 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

FOR MAKING VERSES, chiefly parodies. 
I only remember one line of one parody on a 
poem of L. E. L.'s, about 'Violets, dark blue 
violets'; Thackeray's version was 'Cabbages, 
bright green cabbages,' and we thought it very 
witty. He took part in a scheme, which came 
to nothing, for a school magazine, and he 
wrote verses for it, of which I only remember 
that they were good of their kind. When I 
knew him better, in later years, I thought I 
could recognise the sensitive nature which he 
had as a boy. . . . His change of retrospective 
feeling about his school days was very char- 
acteristic. In his earlier books he always 
spoke of the Charterhouse as the Slaughter 
House and Smithfield. As he became famous 
and prosperous his memory softened, and 
Slaughter House was changed into Grey 
Friars where Colonel Newcome ended his 
life." 

It was Venables, by the way, when both 
were boys at Charterhouse, who gave Thack- 
eray the blow that broke his nose. A more 
significant event was the friendship formed at 
Charterhouse with John Leech, a friendship 
which afterward helped Thackeray to a place 
on the staff of Punch. 

Thackeray's mother had married in 1818, 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 23 

Major William Henry Carmichael Smyth, of 
the Indian service, who is supposed to be the 
original of Colonel Newcome. In 1821, the 
Smyths returned to England and in 1825 took 
a house called Larkbeare, about a mile and a 
half from Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire. 
This house and its surroundings played an im- 
portant part in Thackeray's life. He spent, 
there, his later vacations from Charterhouse. 
He lived at Larkbeare from the time he left 
school in May, 1828, to the time of his entrance 
into Cambridge, as a student of Trinity, Feb- 
ruary, 1829. If we take down Pendennis and 
note the likeness between the names of Claver- 
ing St. Mary and Ottery St. Mary, we have a 
clew to the sources of that great book. Clav- 
ering St. Mary and Ottery St. Mary are the 
same. The real town is described in Thack- 
eray's account of the imaginary one — that lit- 
tle old town of Clavering St. Mary with its 
peaked roofs rising up amongst trees, a fair 
background of sunshiny hills, an old church 
with great grey towers, of which the 
sun illuminates the delicate carving, deepen- 
ing the shadows of the great buttresses, and 
gilding the glittering windows and flaming 
vane. 
The points of coincidence in the careers of 



24 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

Thackeray and Arthur Pendennis are numer- 
ous. Both were Charterhouse boys; both 
lived in the same part of Devonshire; both 
went to Cambridge and idled there; both read 
law and gave it up ; each drifted into literature 
by way of a newspaper; each became at last 
a successful novelist. A frivolous observer 
might insist on the fact that each made his first 
appearance in print as the author of verses in 
a Devonshire county paper. But the similar- 
ity does not extend to subject matter. Pen's 
first appearance was amatory and addressed 
to Miss Fotheringay when impersonating Imo- 
gene. Thackeray's first appearance was in 
burlesque. 

It would seem' that Larkbeare, in which we 
cannot fail to identify the Fairoaks of Pen- 
dennis, was to Thackeray a grateful relief, not 
to say a haven of refuge, after Charterhouse 
School. Too many boys of genius have found 
their schooldays irksome, and Thackeray was 
of the number. In a letter which has been 
often quoted he wrote to his mother: 'T 
really think, I am becoming terribly industri- 
ous, though I can't get Dr. Russell to think so. 
It is hard when you endeavour to work hard 
to find your attempts nipped in the bud — 
There are but 370 in the school. I wish there 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 25 

were but 369." However he escaped from 
Charterhouse — so doubtless the change ap- 
peared to him at the time — and there followed 
a period which reminds one of that interim in 
the life of Pendennis between his leaving 
school and his entrance into the university. 
Thackeray pursued his studies — "read," as 
people used to say — with his stepfather for 
nearly a year. I have mentioned that he en- 
tered Cambridge in February, 1829. He was 
not yet eighteen. 

At the University, he did not distinguish 
himself any more than at school. One of his 
college friends, a future Master of Trinity, 
Dr. Thompson, has declared that his compan- 
ions "did not see in him even the germ of those 
literary powers which, under the stern influ- 
ence of necessity, he afterwards developed." 
In his May examination he was put in the 
fourth class. "It was a class," says Dr. 
Thompson, "where clever, 'non-reading men' 
were put as in a limbo. But though careless 
of University distinction he had a vivid ap- 
preciation of English poetry, and chanted the 
praises of the old English novelists, especially 
his model, Fielding. He had always a flow of 
humour and pleasantry and was made much 
of by his friends. At supper-parties, though 



26 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

not talkative — rather observant — he enjoyed 
the humours of the hour, and sang one or two 
old songs with great applause. 'Old King 
Cole,' I well remember to have heard from 
him at the supper I gave to celebrate my elec- 
tion as scholar. It made me laugh excess- 
ively, not from the novelty of the song but the 
humour with which it was given." 

A diary of Thackeray's which he sent, in 
portions, to his mother has been preserved and 
in part published. It opens as follows: "I 
am now about to begin my first journal, my 
dearest mother, which I hope will be always 
sent with the regularity which it is my full 
purpose to give to it. After father left me, 
I went in rather low spirits to S of Cor- 
pus, and with him strayed about among the 
groves, or rather fields, which skirt the col- 
leges of Kings, Trinity, etc." 

This entry is dated Saturday, 28 February, 
1829. The journal to his mother gives us 
many pleasant glimpses into the life of a 
^'clever non-reading man" eighty years ago. 
Also it is a monument to an affection which is 
among the beautiful things in Thackeray's 
life. For present purposes, however, a single 
passage is all that demands quotation: 

"A poem of mine hath appeared in a weekly 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 27 

periodical here published and called The 
Snob. I will bring it home with me. In a 
month's time I trust to be at home. My pri- 
vate tutor, for a wonder, was not up when I 
went to him at six this morning. I cut lec- 
ture this morning and breakfasted with two 
Charterhouse masters, Penny and Dickens — 
who are Charterhouse masters all over. 
Young had a pleasant wine party at which for 
a short time I attended. 'Timbuctoo' received 
much laud. I could not help finding out that 
I was very fond of this same praise. The 
men knew not the author but praised the 
poem; how eagerly I sucked it in. 'AH is 
vanity!' " 

The "Timbuctoo" mentioned in this entry 
was not Tennyson's poem which won the 
Chancellor's prize in 1829, but a burlesque on 
the same subject written by Thackeray. The 
Snob in which it appeared was a little period- 
ical which stated on its title page that it was 
not conducted by members of the University. 
This curious association of those two great men 
of genius reminds us that Thackeray and 
Tennyson became friends at Cambridge. 

Part of the long vacation of 1829 Thack- 
eray spent at Paris studying French and Ger- 
man. He came up for his degree in 1830, and 



28 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

was not successful. That was the end of his 
University career. 

The story of Thackeray's youth seems to 
have been parted by him among three of his 
characters — Pen, Clive and Philip. To Pen, 
he gave Devonshire, Cambridge and the Tem- 
ple; to Philip, among other things, the life of 
the English student in Paris; to Clive the 
English lad in Germany. Those delightful 
chapters of The Newcomes which transport 
them all to the Rhineland take a new signifi- 
cance as we follow Thackeray's own wander- 
ings after leaving Cambridge. He set out in 
the summer of 1830 and by the end of July 
was at Coblenz, having stayed a month at 
Godesberg. But Weimar was the scene of 
most of his German sojourn. It is Weimar 
that comes to life again in the Pumpernickel 
of Vanity Fair. 

Mr. Herman Merivale who has said many 
suggestive things about Thackeray has some- 
thing on this visit to Weimar which may, or 
may not, be conclusive but which sets us think- 
ing. "Thackeray was still meditating a pro- 
fession," writes Mr. Merivale, . . . "But I 
suspect that it was that life at Weimar that 
fixed the bent before he knew it — What else 
could life at Weimar do? The very name is 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 29 

suggestive of a Court of Letters which has no 
parallel in story; and that a young man like 
Thackeray, fervent of heart, eager of years, 
and imaginative of brain, should come out of 
the living presence of Goethe, and scarce less 
living memory of Schiller, unspoiled for the 
learned professions, and anything other than 
an author foredoomed," was, thinks Mr. 
Merivale, impossible. 

Well, perhaps. Thackeray was a talented, 
versatile, idle, young man of genius. He 
lived at Weimar where he saw Goethe; and 
he admired Schiller who was recently dead. 
He was keenly impressionable. He was un- 
certain what art to take up — if, indeed, he 
should take up any. It is quite possible that 
Weimar may have influenced him more deeply 
than he was aware. Certainly, it greatly 
pleased him. He wrote of it in after years 
that he had "never seen a society more simple, 
charitable, courteous, gentlemanlike, than that 
of the dear little Saxon city where the good 
Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie 
buried." 

Thackeray returned to England in 1831 and 
made a choice of profession which turned out 
to be inconclusive. He chose Law and en- 
tered the Middle Temple. It is doubtful 



30 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

whether his application to Law was any more 
assiduous than that of Mr. Arthur Pendennis 
or Mr. Philip Firmin. But one thing that 
he drew from his life in The Temple was a 
store of scenery which was laid away in his 
capacious memory and afterward reproduced 
in wonderful combinations. "Thackeray had 
his originals in brick and mortar as well as in 
flesh and blood," says Mr. Merivale, and by 
way of confirmation tells this: "When I was 
myself living on a third floor in Garden Court 
— number three it was — I remember how the 
great man honoured me by bringing one of his 
gracious favourites, Lady Colville, to tea in 
the little rooms, and his pleasure in finding 
in them the genuine originals of Chevalier 
Strong's chambers in Shepherd's Inn, with the 
water pipe and gutter which served him as a 
retreat from his creditors, watchful behind the 
sported oak, into Costigan and Bows' nest next 
door." 

Law and politics keep so close together that 
Thackeray's next departure is not surprising. 
In 1832, the year of the Reform Bill, when he 
should have been hard at work, we find him 
away in Cornwall electioneering. He has 
told the tale in a letter to his mother: 

"June 25, 1832, Polwellan, West Looe, 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 31 

Cornwall. Are you surprised, dear Mother, 
at the direction? Certainly not more pre- 
pared for it than I was myself, but you must 
know that on Tuesday in last week I went to 
breakfast with Charles Buller, and he received 
a letter from his constituents at Liskeard re- 
questing him immediately to come down; he 
was too ill, but instead deputed Arthur Buller 
and myself — so off we set, that same night by 
the mail, arrived at Plymouth the next day, 
and at Liskeard the day after, where we wrote 
addresses, canvassed farmers and dined with 
attorneys. Then we came on to Mr. Buller's 
and here I have been very happy since last 
Friday. On Wednesday last I was riding for 
twelve hours canvassing — rather a feat for me, 
and considering I have not been on horseback 
for eight months, my stiffness yesterday was by 
no means surprising; but it is seven o'clock of 
a fine summer's morning, so I have no fatigue 
to complain of. I have been lying awake this 
morning meditating on the wise and proper 
manner I shall employ my fortune in when I 
come of age, which, if I live so long, will take 
place in three weeks. First, I do not intend 
to quit my little chambers in the Temple, then 
I will take a regular monthly income which I 
will never exceed. . . . God bless you, dear 



32 THE SPIRITUAL DRAJNIA IN 

Mother; write directly and give your orders. 
. . . Charles Duller comes down at the end of 
next week — if you want me sooner I will come, 
if not I should like to wait for the reform re- 
joicings which are to take place at his arrival, 
particularly as I have had a great share in the 
canvassing." 

How inevitably one thinks of the great elec- 
tion scenes in The Newcomes and their under- 
study in Philip! 

Thackeray's good resolutions about his prop- 
erty went the way of so many others. His for- 
tune and what became of it has been a subject 
of speculation, but the story seems now to be 
tolerably plain. He came into some 20,000 
pounds in 1832. Eighteen months afterward 
he wrote to his mother that he should thank 
heaven for making him a poor man as now he 
would have to work harder and earn his bread. 
Three causes of his ruin were a newspaper, a 
bank and gambling. 

The latter was once assigned as the main 
cause of his losses, and though the details are 
not public property, the following incident was 
first published by permission of his family: 
Along with Sir Theodore Martin he was walk- 
ing, one afternoon, through the play rooms at 
Spa and stopped at the Rouge et Noir table to 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 33 

look on. While standing there, Thackeray 
touched his companion on the elbow and asked 
him to observe "a tall man, in a seedy brown 
frock coat, at the other end of the table. The 
man's appearance was that of a broken down 
gentleman who had still the remains of a cer- 
tain distinction of manner." So, Sir Theo- 
dore Martin described him, adding that as 
they were walking away, Thackeray said, 
"That was the original of my Deuceace; I 
have not seen him since the day he drove me 
down in his cabriolet to my brokers in the City 
and I sold out my patrimony and handed it 
over to him." Thackeray also said that this 
man and another, knowing that he was newly 
come into money, induced him to play ecarte 
with them; they let him win at first but soon 
turned on him and did not let him ofif until 
they had won fifteen hundred pounds. This 
story was told by Thackeray without any acri- 
mony and was closed with this characteristic 
comment: "Poor devil! my money doesn't 
seem to have thriven with him." 

''You are quite safe," wrote Martin later to 
Herman Merivale, "in saying that Deuceace 
was drawn from the life. I am quite sure of 
what I told you. Well do I remember, as we 
walked out into the soft sweet air of the sum- 



34 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

mer evening, how a sort of sadness seemed to 
settle upon Thackeray, as if the recollection 
of what he had told me had been too much for 
him ; and he said, although it was quite early, 
*I think I'll go home to my hotel,' which he 
did. He told me other things in his life of 
a very striking kind, but I know they were 
meant for myself alone. Poor fellow, he had 
some terribly bitter experiences." 

The second cause of his loss of a fortune 
was an Indian bank, the failure of which is 
supposed to be the origin of that other failure 
which overwhelmed Colonel Newcome. It 
should be remembered that Major Smyth is 
the reputed original of Colonel Newcome. 
Both were lovable, simple-hearted, unpracti- 
cal men with a weakness for speculation. 
More than once Major Smyth got his stepson 
into difficulties. If he was Thackeray's early 
adviser in business, Thackeray could hardly 
have had a worse one. 

His third venture was also a failure. In 
January, 1833, appeared the first number of 
the National Standard — a Journal of Litera- 
ture, Science, Music, Theatricals and the Fine 
Arts. By the end of the previous year, Thack- 
eray had made up his mind to abandon Law 
and was looking about for an opening of an 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 35 

artistic sort. He thought he saw it in this 
journal, which he bought and undertook to 
edit. If there is any moment in his career 
that appeals especially to the cheerful imagi- 
nation it is his assumption of control over The 
Standard, upon which he intended to stamp 
his personality and by which he would make a 
great name and astonish the world. At that 
time he was not quite twenty-two; he had just 
discarded a profession; he was brilliant, ar- 
dent, inexperienced, and believing. He lived 
to put the story of his first great defeat into 
his novel of Lovel the Widower. 

"They are welcome," says the bachelor, "to 
make merry at my charges in respect of a cer- 
tain bargain which I made on coming to Lon- 
don, and in which, had I been Moses Primrose 
purchasing green spectacles, I could scarcely 
have been more taken in. My Jenkinson was 
an old college acquaintance, whom I was 
idiot enough to imagine a respectable man. 
The fellow had a very smooth tongue and sleek 
and sanctified exterior. He was rather a 
popular preacher, and used to cry a good deal 
in the pulpit. He and a queer wine merchant 
and bill discounter, Sherrick by name, had 
somehow got possession of that neat little lit- 
erary paper, The Museum, which perhaps you 



36 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

remember, and this eligible literary property 
my friend Honeyman, with his wheedling 
tongue, induced me to purchase." 

In June, 1833, Thackeray went to Paris as 
correspondent for The Standard and remained 
in Paris through the summer. When he came 
back in November, The Standard was in a bad 
way. In February, 1834, the paper reached 
its last number. 

Defeated in his first great bout with Life, 
with his money gone, Thackeray determined to 
try his luck in a different field and set out on a 
serious attempt to be a painter. That same 
year, 1834, ^^ began the attempt at Paris. 
For two years, or so, he struggled along trying 
hard to draw and also, apparently, to write. 
As everyone knows he never got far in his 
drawing, though some draughtsmen have 
thought he had the making of a fine hand. 
He certainly had a delightful but unreliable 
trick of caricature which he turned later to 
good account. In 1836, he applied to Dickens 
for permission to illustrate Pickwick, but his 
services were not accepted. That year ap- 
peared his first publication, "Flore et Zephyr," 
a series of eight satirical drawings published 
at London and Paris. 
While Thackeray had been struggling along 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 37 

in Paris, his stepfather had indulged his love 
of speculation and had organised a new Lib- 
eral paper called The Constitutional. It was 
to begin on the fifteenth of September, 1836. 
In July, Thackeray was appointed Paris cor- 
respondent at eight guineas a week. 

And now, with a new lease of hope, this un- 
daunted dreamer flung the golden dice that 
fortune trusts so recklessly in the hands of 
youth. The lady's name was Isabella Shawe. 
She was Irish, the daughter of a Colonel Mat- 
thew Shawe who had been military secretary 
to the Marquis of Wellesley. She was a 
minor and was married to Thackeray, "with 
consent of her mother," as the record shows, 
at the British Embassy in Paris, August 20, 

1836. 

Thackeray and his girl bride were home 
from their honeymoon in time for him to begin 
work as correspondent for The Constitutional 
in September. The paper failed in July, 
1837, leaving a debt which embarrassed 
Major Smyth for several years. Now came a 
desperate tug for the Thackerays. At one 
time, he was writing in Paris on ten francs a 
day. Before the end of 1837 ^^ was living at 
13 Great Coram Street, London, and doing all 
sorts of hack work. It was then that he wrote 



38 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

for The Times a review of "The French Revo- 
lution," and was thus described by Carlylc: 

"The critic is one Thackeray, a half mon- 
strous Cornish giant, kind of painter Cam- 
bridgeman and Paris newspaper correspond- 
ent, who is now writing for his life in London." 

Writing for his life was indeed what Thack- 
eray was doing. All through 1838 he wrote 
much for The Times, for the Morning Chroni- 
cle, for the New Monthly Magazine, for 
Frazer's, for Ainsworth's, for the Westminster 
Review. He had made the acquaintance of 
Cruikshank and wrote for his Omnibus and the 
Comic Almanac. He used both verse and 
prose and still tried to turn a penny by draw- 
ing. A curious account of him, at this time, 
is a letter of introduction sent by C. B. Cole to 
Cobden with one of Thackeray's sketches. 
Cole thought that the young man might be 
given work in the Anti-Corn Law campaign. 
He wrote : 

"The artist is a genius both with his pen and 
his pencil. His vocation is literary. He is 
full of humour and feeling. Hitherto he has 
not had occasion to think much on the subject 
of Corn Laws, and therefore wants the stuff to 
work upon. He would like to combine both 
writing and drawing when sufficiently primed, 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 89 

and then he would write and illustrate ballads, 
or tales, or anything. I think you would find 
him a most useful auxiliary." 

But Thackeray's main bent had by now be- 
come apparent. Though he was practising 
three arts, drawing, verse and prose, it was 
plain that only one was his own. The draw- 
ing and the verse were mere graceful embroid- 
eries and the real fabric was the prose. 

But it is also quite plain that in those days 
Thackeray lacked conviction as to what he was 
fitted to write about. He was not one of your 
lucky writers who are gifted with what may 
be called the instinct of subject matter, who 
know from the start just what they should deal 
with. However, certain things were in the 
air, just then — for example, burlesque. The 
influence of Dickens, who was already in the 
full flush of his enormous popularity, was felt 
by Thackeray more deeply than his worship- 
pers like to admit and when, in 1838, he at 
last did something noteworthy, the influence of 
Dickens had a hand in that success. It was 
the now famous Fashionable Fax and Polite 
Annygoats, by Charles Yellowplush, which 
appeared in Fraze/s Magazine. All of us 
know Yellowplush, the footman, Thackeray's 
puppet satirist, by means of whom he struck 



40 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

some hard blows, and whose "orthography is 
inaccurate." Snobbery is the main butt of the 
shooting but the fire ranges pretty widely to 
right and left. It was through Yellowplush 
that Thackeray dealt his merciless blow to 
Bulwer. He followed up his attack on Bul- 
wer by that demi-novel, so to speak, Catherine, 
which is half a real story, half a travesty on 
Eugene Aram. Catherine, written in the 
first person, purports to be the work of Ikey 
Solomon. "Be it granted," says Thackeray in 
the epilogue, "Solomon is dull; but don't at- 
tack his morality. He humbly submits that, 
in his poem, no man shall mistake virtue for 
vice, no man shall allow a single sentiment of 
pity or admiration to enter his bosom for any 
character in the poem, it being from beginning 
to end a scene of unmixed rascality, performed 
by persons who never deviate into good feel- 
ing." 

Thus early do we see that bent for castiga- 
tion, that willingness to make assault upon 
evil, which was afterward to be so large a part 
of Thackeray's arsenal. As yet, however, he 
was too obscure to be a formidable enemy. 
Years were still to pass before he ceased to be 
a mere hack who barely managed to make 
both ends meet. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 41 

Thackeray was to be called upon, however, 
to stand a test far more searching than ad- 
versity. Hitherto he had been sustained by 
the idyllic happiness of his marriage. He was 
devoted to his wife and children — there were 
three children, of whom two survived infancy 
and were their father's consolation in later 
years — and this period of his hardest pecuni- 
ary struggle was undoubtedly his happiest 
time. Speaking of his wife, long afterward, 
he said to one of his cousins, ^'I was as happy 
as the day was long with her." 

We come, now, to the year 1840, and the 
catastrophe which counts for so much in ex- 
plaining Thackeray. In the spring of that 
year, he made a brief trip to Belgium. When 
he went away his wife appeared to be well; 
when he returned she was suffering from lan- 
guor and depression. Her malady grew 
steadily more distressing. Thackeray took her 
abroad to Paris, and then to Germany, and at 
one time wrote home that she was all but cured. 
But he was deceiving himself. She ceased 
presently to recognise people and before long 
it was necessary to place her in the constant 
care of an attendant. Her mind had become 
a blank. 

The effects of this blow upon Thackeray 



42 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

cannot be overestimated. His bereavement 
touched every fibre both of his heart and his 
brain. In him tenderness was very nearly, if 
not quite, the major part and there is abun- 
dant evidence that the cloud of this great grief 
never lifted. An old Irish groom in the 
stables of Anthony TroUope once said to 
Thackeray, "I hear you have written a book 
upon Ireland, and are always making fun of 
the Irish ; you don't like us." "God help me !" 
said Thackeray, turning away his head as his 
eyes filled with tears, "all that I have loved 
best in the world is Irish." He wrote to a 
young man who was struggling for fortune 
in order to marry, "If I can see my way to help 
you, I will. Though my marriage was a 
wreck, as you know, I would do it over again, 

\ for behold Love is the crown and completion 

I of all earthly good." 

Again, years after, writing of his two chil- 
dren whom he had taken for a trip up the 
Rhine, he says, "I sat with the children and 
talked with them about their mother last night. 
It is my pleasure to tell them how humble 
minded their mother was." In still another 
letter he has touched upon this sad subject in 
his own inimitable way: 

"As I am waiting to see Mrs, BuUer, I find 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 43 

an old Review with an advertisement in it, 
containing a great part of an article I wrote 
about Fielding, in 1840 in the Times. . , . 
My wife was just sickening at that moment: 
I wrote it at Margate, where I had taken her, 
and used to walk out three miles to a little 
bowling green, and write there in an arbour — 
coming home and wondering what was the 
melancholy oppressing the poor little woman. 
The Times gave me five guineas for the 
article. I recollect I thought it rather shabby 
pay, and twelve days after it appeared in the 
paper my poor little wife's malady showed 
itself. . . . God help us what a deal of 
cares, and pleasures, and struggles and happi- 
ness I have had since that day in the little sun- 
shiny arbour, where, with scarcely any money 
in my pocket and two little children (Minnie 
was a baby two months' old), I was writing 
this notice about Fielding. Grief, Love, 
Fame, if you like: I have had no little of all 
since then. (I don't mean to take the Fame 
for more than it's worth, or brag about it with 
any peculiar elation)." 

Thus the first main division of Thackeray's 
life came to an end. His children were 
sent to their grandparents in Paris. His wife 
was placed in the care of her attendant. 



44 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

Thackeray himself took lodgings and buried 
himself in work. Little over thirty, but shut 
up within himself in the heart's solitude; 
broadly and deeply unfortunate; having failed 
in all his ventures; having parted with happi- 
ness; he fell into that tone of brave sadness 
which sounds so finely through most of his 
books. For a man who felt as deeply as 
Thackeray did, it was not possible to throw 
off his burden. The most he could do was to 
conceal it. He did so. He hid his tears be- 
hind that whimsical, pitying smile which is at 
once so brave and so pathetic. Sometimes it 
happens that the most sensitive people are the 
bravest in trouble — sometimes, not always — 
and Thackeray is a case in point. From this 
time forward there is in all his writings a 
piercing sense of the sadness, the weariness, 
the unhappiness of the world. But he does 
not surrender to it. He denounces the thought 
of surrender in others. He has for himself the 
strong man's solace of work. Through all his 
darkness he keeps faith that somehow the 
"Awful Father" will at last untangle this sad 
strange web of our afflictions. And always 
to the outward world he maintains an un- 
broken front. But people who hold the clue 
discern the tears always behind the smile. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 45 

"In attempting to understand his character," 
wrote his friend Trollope, "it is necessary for 
you to bear within your own mind, the idea 
that he was always encountering melancholy 
with buffoonery and meanness with satire." 



CHAPTER III 

THE APPRENTICE HAND 

(4^ I A HE two key-secrets of Thackeray's 
I great life, as I take it," says his 
-■• most sympathetic biographer, 
Herman Merivale, "were these — Disappoint- 
ment and Religion. The first was his poison; 
the second was his antidote. And the anti- 
dote won. No wonder that he was disap- 
pointed. First, a man of fortune, then a 
ruined and struggling artist, then a journalist, 
recognised to the full as such even by the 
brothers of his craft, but, like them, very little 
beyond it, then at last the novelist and the fa- 
mous man, he was thirty-six before the first 
number of Vanity Fair was published. 
Till then he was not really known ... he 
saw the other of the great twin brethren, one 
half year his junior, in the full flood of fame 
at twenty-four years old. Dickens was born 
in February, 1812. In 1841 he was ban- 
queted at Edinburgh as no man was before, 
with 'Christopher North' in the chair, be- 
fore Thackeray knew 'what he was going to 

46 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 47 

be,' but of the versatility of mind which is as 
great a danger as a charm. Dickens knew his 
own line from the first." 

There is more to be said, however, than is 
set out in these sentences. Sheer versatility, no 
doubt, stood in Thackeray's way at the start, 
and he, like all men of varied endowment, 
spent a long time casting about among his 
talents, seeking to determine where lay his real 
strength. Dickens with less natural endow- 
ment learned sooner how to use what he had. 
But when this has been allowed for, the differ- 
ence between their careers is not yet explained. 
For an adequate explanation we must observe 
the difference in their natures. 

The firmness, not to say hardness, of Dick- 
ens contrasts at every point with the gentleness, 
the sensitiveness, of Thackeray. The fact that 
"Dickens knew his line from the first" is in- 
dicative of a natural decision which seems to 
have been lacking in Thackeray. The story 
of his youth shows how vividly he responded 
to circumstances, how easily he passed from 
one purpose to another, how enthusiastically he 
followed each new venture. In a word, there 
was a side to Thackeray which most people 
would call weak, and for this side of him he 
paid a sad price. And yet, it was because of 



48 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

this side, when at last it had been refined and 
tempered by suffering, that Thackeray was 
able to cast up the sum of human life with 
truer justice and wider range of vision than 
any other English novelist and also with a 
tenderness of sympathy not equalled except by 
Miss Austen. 

The sentences from Mr. Merivale are 
slightly misleading because they do not sug- 
gest that Thackeray's religion had more to do 
than merely to overcome his disappointments, 
that its greatest task was to overcome his nat- 
ural weakness. Mr. Merivale's silence upon 
this point is significant. Thackeray was a type 
of man to whom most people have great diffi- 
culty in being squarely just. If he appeal to 
one at all he appeals so deeply that the tempta- 
tion to hold a brief for him is great. If, on 
the other hand, one has that resolute self- 
confidence which the parable of the mote and 
the beam does not penetrate, the temptation to 
be clever at his expense is hardly to be re- 
sisted. Therein lies the fault of the most re- 
cent life of him, the otherwise valuable memoir 
by Mr. Whibley. Excellent as the book is in 
many respects the general effect of it is false. 
For Mr. Whibley ignores entirely the inward 
drama of Thackeray's great life. If one were 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 49 

to describe him with as little charity as he 
shows to Thackeray, one would say that he 
lacks spiritual vision. He is blind to that 
long, slow but at length victorious warfare of 
Thackeray's religion against his weakness. 

Only by keeping that drama in mind can we 
see him as he really was, neither a Prometheus 
as he appears to Mr. Merivale, nor a senti- 
mentalist as he appears to Mr. Whibley, but 
a sensitive, unhappy man, who, in his early life, 
showed something of the Prometheus: who 
took on for a season not a little of the senti- 
mentalist; but who became at last bravely and 
simply a Christian. 

The first act of Thackeray's inward drama 
closed with the ruin of his home in 1840. 
This occurred in the midst of his literary ap- 
prenticeship which it tended naturally to 
darken and retard. His religion, at that time, 
though it saved him from surrender to despair, 
was not yet strong enough to keep his grief 
within bounds. The result is Thackeray's con- 
stant tendency in all his earlier books to look 
upon the dark side. Though he knows there 
are others who are happy, though he does not 
lose faith in the life to come where somehow 
all things will be adjusted, yet, for this pres- 
ent, beneath the weight of his own affliction, 



50 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

he gives way to the impulse to brood darkly 
upon the wretchedness of the world. Because 
he does so, it is easy for the serene student to 
take the tone of superiority, to brand Thack- 
eray as a "sentimentalist." There is no deny- 
ing that it is a great sin to make a luxury of 
unhappiness, to convert one's heart into a 
forcing house for woe, and from the fruit of 
despair suck a bitter stimulant. The man who 
does so is indeed a sentimentalist, and we must 
admit that Thackeray between thirty and 
forty erred somewhat in that direction. And 
yet, whoso makes a sneer out of this fact, con- 
victs himself of superficiality, demonstrates his 
blindness to the inner drama that was going on 
in this noble spirit. If Thackeray's star went 
down for a time into darkness, it rose again 
more glorious by far than before it set. As 
to the defeat of his resolution in these early 
years, and the glib verdict that has been passed 
upon him, we cannot do better than remember 
Romeo's line, "He jests at scars who never felt 
a wound." 

In 1 841, the year Dickens was banqueted 
at Edinburgh, "as no man was before," 
Thackeray was at Paris writing The Second 
Funeral of Napoleon, of which Edward Fitz- 
gerald, in a letter dated February 18, 1841, 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 51 

writes thus : "Have you read Thackeray's little 
book, The Second Funeral of Napoleon? If 
not, pray do, and buy it and ask others to buy 
it: as each copy sold puts 7I/2 d in T's pocket: 
which is not very heavy just now, I take it." 

This "little book" which purported to be the 
work of Michael Angelo Titmarsh is an ad- 
mirable specimen of Thackeray's hack writing. 
The public however "refused to read it." 
After Thackeray's death, as Mrs. Ritchie tells 
us, the manuscript was contributed to the Corn- 
hill Magazine with this note from the gentle- 
man who had been her father's agent in pub- 
lishing it: "I had the pleasure of editing the 
tiny volume for Mr. Titmarsh and saw it 
through the press, and after awhile, on the dis- 
mal tidings that the little effort made no im- 
pression on the public, Mr. Titmarsh wrote 
to me from Paris a pretty little note commenc- 
ing, 'So your poor Titmarsh has made an- 
other fiasco. How are we to take this great 
stupid public by the ears? Never mind, I 
think I have something that will surprise them 
yet!' " The "something" seems to have been 
the first notes of Vanity Fair, though six years 
were to pass before they came to anything. 

In spite of the "stupid public" of that day 
and its lack of taste, the Second Funeral is a 



52 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

charming little book. Though it is hardly 
more than a newspaper report, you may go a 
long way before you find elsewhere such art 
with such faithfulness to fact and such simplic- 
ity. Those two or three pages in which Mr. 
Titmarsh describes the English family that 
lodges in the same house with him are above 
praise. How beautiful they are, how per- 
fectly simple, without the least disguise of 
rhetoric, but also how full of Thackeray's 
mood, how wistful! He dwells upon the pic- 
ture of that happy family with a loving insist- 
ence that betrays itself. People who are 
happy themselves do not dwell thus fondly on 
the spectacle of a contented family going out 
for a holiday. It is the lonely men and 
women who pause on the street to watch such 
parties, who go home and put into beautiful 
words that loveliest thing in life, the simple, 
ordinary happiness of normal people. Know- 
ing when this little book was written, knowing 
how lonely Thackeray was, we can read a 
great deal between the lines of his description 
of— 

"The grandfather, who is as proud of his 
wife as he was thirty years ago when he 
married, and pays her compliments still twice 
or thrice a day, and when he leads her into a 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 53 

room, looks round at the persons assembled and 
says in his heart, 'Here, gentlemen, here is my 
wife: show me such another woman in Eng- 
land!' — this gentleman had hired a room on 
the Champs filysees, for he would not have his 
wife catch cold by exposing her to the bal- 
conies in the open air." 

We need not be told how Thackeray turned 
away from that pretty picture and saw the face 
of his own love with the mind gone from it, 
nor how wearily he went to his work. 

Of another book of the same period. The 
Great Hogarty Diamond, which was also a 
failure, Thackeray has said, "It was written at 
a time when the author was suffering the 
severest personal grief and calamity — " "at a 
time," he writes again, "when my heart was 
very soft and humble": namely, 1841. The 
same year he published also Comic Tales 
which were not much. In 1842 he visited Ire- 
land, met Lever and collected material for the 
Irish Sketch Book which came out the year 
after. Punch, meanwhile, had come into ex- 
istence with Leech as a contributor. Leech 
succeeded in getting on the staff his old school- 
mate and in June, 1842, Thackeray contributed 
The Legend of Jawbrahim Heraudee. The 
same year Miss Tickletohy's Lectures on Eng- 



54 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

glish History came out in Punch. Thackeray 
not only wrote for Punch but also made draw- 
ings. He contributed in all 380 sketches. 
One of them has a curious notoriety. No one 
has ever been able to determine what it is 
about. A rival paper once offered a prize for 
a solution of the riddle. In 1843, Thackeray 
was included in the Christmas dinner of "Mr. 
Punch's Cabinet." 

During the five years following his great 
catastrophe Thackeray lived in chambers — 
first at 27 Jermyn Street, then at 88 St. James 
Street — while his children remained with their 
grandparents. His poverty shut him out of 
the more conspicuous society of the day and 
such pleasure as he had was derived from ob- 
serving the reckless humours of Bohemia and 
from the life of his clubs. As early as 1833, 
when he was a prosperous youth of twenty- two, 
he had joined the Garrick Club. In March, 
1840, he had been elected to the Reform Club. 
"He was a frequenter," says his son-in-law, Sir 
Leslie Stephen, "of 'Evans' described in many 
of his works, and belonged at this and later 
periods to various sociable clubs of the old- 
fashioned style, such as the Shakespeare, the 
Fielding (of which he was a founder) and 
'Our Club.' There in the evenings he met 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 55 

literary comrades and gradually became 
known as an eminent member of the fraternity. 
Meanwhile, as he said, although he could suit 
the magazines, he could not hit the public." 

The experience of these years, the club life 
and the Bohemian life, was afterward minted 
into sterling fiction and made precious chap- 
ters in Pendennis, The Newcomes, and 
Philip. Such odd resorts, half bar-room, 
half club, as the "Back Kitchen," and the 
"Cave of Harmony," gave Thackeray a part of 
his recreation in those lonely years between 
1 840 and 1 846. He learned to know the whole 
world of Grub Street and when in after years 
he depicted it without reserve — its foibles, its 
vanities, its jealousies — he was accused of 
being a snob and of "fostering a prejudice 
against literary men." 

The association in the popular mind of 
Thackeray with snobdom dates from 1846 
when the famous Snob Papers, afterward col- 
lected as the Book of Snobs, began running in 
Punch. We should notice that it was a sharp 
and satiric subject, one with which he could 
give vent to his bitter mood, that enabled 
Thackeray to write with sufficient edge to cut 
his way through the public indifference. 
"The Snob Papers had a very marked effect," 



56 THE spiritual; DRAMA IN 

to quote from Sir Leslie Stephen, "and may be 
said to have made Thackeray famous. The 
success of the Snob Papers perhaps led Thack- 
eray to insist a little too frequently upon a cer- 
tain variety of social informity. He was occa- 
sionally accused of sharing the weakness which 
he satirised and would playfully admit that 
the charge was not altogether ground- 
less. . . . Thackeray was at this time an in- 
habitant of Bohemia and enjoyed the humours 
and unconventional ways of the region. But 
he was a native of his own Tyburnia forced in- 
to Bohemia by distress and there meeting many 
men of the Bludger type who were his in- 
feriors in refinement and cultivation — Thack- 
eray an intellectual artistocrat though politic- 
ally a liberal was naturally an object of some 
suspicion to the rougher among his compan- 
ions. If he appreciated refinement too keenly 
no accusation of anything like meanness has 
ever been made against him." 

A great deal has been made of the charge 
that Thackeray was morbid on the subject of 
snobbery. Says Mr. Whibley, who never loses 
a chance to be hard upon him, "the truth is 
Thackeray had 'an eye for a snob' ; he tracked 
snobs through history as certain little dogs in 
Hampshire hunt out truffles. Wherever there 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 57 

was a man he saw a snob ; if the man were of 
high rank, he overvalued himself; if he were 
of low rank he overvalued others. Lady 
Bareacres is a snob because she spends more 
than she can afford: Lady Scraper is a snob 
because she prefers a mutton chop eaten in 
splendour to a whole saddle consumed at Brix- 
ton; Sir Walter Raleigh was a snob, because, 
being a loyal courtier, he spread his cloak be- 
neath the feet of his sovereign." 

Mr. Whibley's book is a valuable contribu- 
tion to the study of Thackeray because in it a 
number of relationships between the novels 
and their "sources" have been clearly traced 
and compactly presented. But from first to 
last it is void of humanity. Upon matters 
purely technical, Mr. Whibley is admirable. 
If the problem of a great author's life could 
be solved by conceiving of him as a trinity of 
pen, ink-pot and sheet of paper, Mr. Whibley 
would be the man to do it. The idea that a 
writer like other men has his soul — and that 
the state of it must always contain his final 
secret — is, to Mr. Whibley, an exploded super- 
stition. When one is freed completely from 
that troublesome and old-fashioned belief, and 
can put in its place a conviction that the real 
world is one's table top, one may, if one is 



58 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

clever, become a sparkling writer for whom 
everything is on the surface. Mr. Whibley is 
very clever but he writes down his own con- 
demnation in his final chapter when he says 
that what Thackeray "was at the beginning he 
was at the end — a man of letters to whom time 
and experience gave not a new style, but merely 
a better control of his material." Style, tech- 
nique — in a narrow case, — is all Mr. Whibley 
can see. Otherwise he is literarily colour 
blind. But the great thing in Thackeray is 
the revolution in his "material" wrought by 
time and experience through the development 
of his religious sense. His style may not have 
changed radically but his "tone" did. Cen- 
sure which he deserved when he wrote the 
Book of Snobs, ceased afterward to have point. 
What Mr. Whibley says against him fits the de- 
spairing Thackeray of the age of thirty-five. 
We shall see how such censure ceased to ap- 
ply. 

That year, 1846, beheld the appearance of 
Mr. Titmarsh's Journey from Cornhill to 
Grand Cairo. It was based on a trip to the 
Levant made two years previous when the 
directors of the Peninsular and Oriental Com- 
pany had presented Thackeray with free pas- 
sage. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 59 

In Frazer's, during 1846, appeared his first 
great achievement, The Luck of Barry Lyn- 
don. 

This powerful novel, however, was not suc- 
cessful and was not reprinted as a volume un- 
til long afterward. To-day, the exclusive 
student, profiting by the accident of a special 
training, reads Barry Lyndon and exclaims 
"What a wonderful work of art! How ob- 
tuse was the audience which did not perceive 
its excellence !" With a shrug of disdain, per- 
haps, he turns the cold shoulder to that whole 
world which applauded Dickens during ten 
hard years before Thackeray got a hearing. 

Undoubtedly Barry Lyndon is one of the 
most remarkable performances in fiction. 
But just as surely it could never be popular. 
The fact that Thackeray wrote such a book, 
while struggling to establish himself, shows 
that he had failed signally to allow for the 
difference between the point of view of the 
artist and the point of view of the audience. 
This, I think, is the true explanation of his 
slow acceptance by the public. We of the 
Gothic races do not as a rule have much capac- 
ity for getting pleasure from watching an 
artist at work. With us, as a rule, the subject 
is before all else. Our popular writers know 



60 THE SPIRITUAL DRAI^IA IN 

this by instinct, and build upon it. They make 
their methods mere pack horses for their mat- 
ter. But now and then we have an artist so 
stubbornly of the other sort that only after a 
^ 4ong beating will he take the public at its word, 
cease to think first about method and begin 
thinking first about matter. Thackeray was 
such an artist. No one ever expressed more 
exactly the characteristic feeling of such an 
artist than he did in those fine sentences in 
Philip which describe the painter, "J. J." at 
his easel. Thackeray loses himself in his sym- 
pathy with the mere technical battle against 
lights, shades, tones, and tints. He forgets, for 
the moment, whether it is the blush of a peach 
or a woman which the painter seeks to ex- 
press. He forgets everything but the strug- 
gle of the artist with his technical difficulties. 
His sympathy is as deep, his enthusiasm as 
real, as if he were watching an army in its as- 
sault on a fortress. When the painter, calling 
up his last reserve, puts forth his entire 
strength and advancing along his whole line, 
takes the difficulty by storm, Thackeray throws 
up his cap and wants to shout for joy. 

What stood in Thackeray's way was the in- 
ability of his audience to have similar feelings, 
for a book. He kept forgetting the value 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 61 

which his audience set on subject matter. So 
vivid was his own interest in how things 
were done that he was willing, almost to let 
his subject take care of itself — to write on 
whatever came uppermost in his mind — and 
seek to make his effect by the way in which his 
material was handled. Herein was his con- 
trast with the other of "the great twin brethren 
of the novel." Dickens advanced into litera- 
ture along the broad high road of the signifi- 
cance of subject matter. The youthful author 
of Pickwick stepped confidently on the stage 
and claimed the attention of his audience by 
right of the diverting information he would 
impart. The youthful Thackeray, without »/ 
that consciousness of some definite thing to say, 
but aware of his artistic superiority, found it 
hard to understand why his work did not take. 

The subjects which rose of themselves to the 
top of his mind were too sombre for his au- 
dience, and he, being deficient in the instinct 
for matter, was too willing to let them pass 
unchallenged, too ready to spend his whole 
strength upon the difficulties of expression. 
In a word, Thackeray, the born stylist, was 
prone to forget that there are other things in a 
novel beside style. 

The admirer of Barry Lyndon must be able 



62 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

to lose himself in the love of style. Otherwise 
the book would be intolerable. For, in this, 
his first novel worth the name, Thackeray set 
himself a great task but one in which the sub- 
ject matter cannot possibly attract us. In 
doing so he built to some extent on his savage 
and unpleasant Catherine, of six years pre- 
vious. 

The words in which he describes the former 
book apply equally well to the latter, "it being 
from beginning to end, a scene of unmixed 
rascality performed by persons who never 
deviate into good feeling." 

So much for the repulsiveness of the subject. 
The greatness of the artistic achievement is in 
this : it exposes a scoundrel through his auto- 
biography. Thackeray indeed had his cour- 
age about him when he attempted it. 

To invent a career in which, from the first 
action to the last, there never shall be one mo- 
ment of unselfishness, nor one glimmer of real 
affection ; to put the tale of this career into the 
mouth of the wretch himself; to make him 
candid and yet keep our interest: this is an 
undertaking to which few novelists are equal. 
But just this is what Thackeray did and the re- 
sult is a tour-de-force of the first magnitude. 
Barry is perfectly frank; he conceals nothing: 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 63 

we know he is an arch scoundrel — cheat, liar, 
gambler, brute — and yet he never becomes a 
mere monster, he always retains a touch of 
grace, and he keeps our interest. Further- 
more, his self-revelation never appears to be 
forced. While we listen, it seems quite the 
natural thing. Only in retrospect do we real- 
ise how unnaturally frank he has been. As 
sheer art, this first of Thackeray's great crea- 
tions is equal to any. 

The materials of the book may be traced, 
first of all, in Thackeray's own experience. 
The external misfortunes of his youth were due 
chiefly either to the dissembling greed of a 
gambler or to the selfish wiliness of schemers. 
Throughout his novels, the gambler and the 
schemer are most frequent among the human 
causes of unhappiness. In the darkness of his 
earlier mood Thackeray combined the two, 
called the result Barry Lyndon, and fairly 
gloated upon the masterful sublety with which 
he exposed its evil. However, the piecing to- 
gether of episodes into a general narrative 
came hard for him and in order to get assist- 
ance in constructing Barry's career he appears 
to have had recourse to several books. 

First of all he drew from Fielding. In 
Jonathan Wild he found a model by which he 



64 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

profited in everything relating to method. 
This great book, like Barry Lyndon, is the 
sustained portrait of a scoundrel, and like it is 
a triumph of art. For one of the most striking 
episodes in Barry Lyndon, that of Duke Vic- 
tor and his wretched wife, Thackeray was in- 
debted to a book called L Empere, on dix 
ans sous Napoleon. The portrait of Sir 
Charles Lyndon is supposed to be a study of 
Charles Hanbury Williams, described by Mr. 
Whibley as "a great wit in a witty age, a diplo- 
mat and man of the world, whose fate was as 
hapless as Lyndon's own." Three historic 
characters were drawn upon for Barry's ad- 
ventures — that famous prince of gamblers, 
Casanova; the singular English scoundrel, 
Andrew Robinson Stoney; and an Irish black- 
guard called Tiger Roche. To the latter Mr. 
Whibley assigns a good deal of the character 
of Barry and perhaps has reason to do so. To 
the "memoirs" of Casanova is due, beyond a 
doubt, Thackeray's general knowledge of the 
gaming life of the eighteenth century. The 
main action of the book seems to have been de- 
rived chiefly from the career of Stoney. 

That blackguard, after marrying one heiress 
and abusing her, made a capture of the blue 
stocking countess of Strathmore, of whom 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 65 

Lady Lyndon is an echo. "Even in the small- 
est details the similarity of truth and fiction 
is evident," says Mr. Whibley, speaking of the 
debt of the novel to the career of Stoney. 
However, we must always allow for Mr. 
Whibley's desire to steal a morsel from 
Thackeray's credit, though, as he points out, a 
passage which he quotes from a chap book of 
the day, fits "Barry and his spouse to a hair." 
The passage is as follows: "Here then were 
joined in holy wedlock, two such as for the 
honour of nature are seldom to be seen. The 
one had broken the heart of a former wife: the 
other had not lengthened the days of a former 
husband : in a battle royal of a main of cocks, 
the two surviving ones contend for existence, 
and thus are these two pitted as if by positive 
destruction." 

From these materials Thackeray constructed 
a character which absorbed into one great por- 
trait the very essence of that whole world of 
heartless and false people who were attacked 
in the Book of Snobs. Barry's idea of being a 
gentleman is to dress well, to wear a sword 
with grace, and to be on easy terms with the 
great. He is a professional gambler who has 
played in every capital of Europe. "Play 
grandly," says he, "honourably. Be not of 



66 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

course, cast down, at losing; but above all be 
not eager at winning as mean souls are." His 
manners, his gentlehood, his air, all these are 
put on from without like a garment. He does 
not know that they are. He believes in them 
thoroughly. Just the same there is nothing 
genuine in him but his selfishness, his audacity, 
and his wits. Here is his philosophy: 

"The broker of the exchange who bulls and 
bears, and buys and sells, and dabbles with ly- 
ing loans, and trades upon state secrets — what 
is he but a gamester? The merchant who 
deals in teas and tallows, is he any better? 
His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards 
come up every year instead of every ten min- 
utes, and the sea is his green-table — You call 
the profession of the law an honourable one, 
where a man will lie for any bidder — lie down 
poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth ; lie 
down right because wrong is in his brief. 
You call a doctor an honourable man, — a 
swindling quack who does not believe in the 
nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your 
guinea for whispering in your ear that it is a 
fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant 
man, who sits him down before the baize and 
challenges all comers, his money against theirs, 
his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 67 

modern moral world! It is a conspiracy of 
the middle class against gentlemen. It is only 
the shopkeeper cant which is to go down now- 
adays. I say that play was an institution of 
chivalry. It has been wrecked along with 
other privileges of men of birth. When 
Seingalt engaged a man for six and thirty 
hours without leaving the table, do you think 
he showed no courage? How have we had the 
best blood and the brightest eyes, too, of 
Europe throbbing round the table, as I and 
my uncle have held the cards and the bank 
against some terrible player, who was match- 
ing some thousands out of his millions against 
our all, which was there on the baize! When 
we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, 
and won seven thousand louis on a single coup, 
had we lost we should have been beggars the 
next day; when he lost, he was only a village 
and a few hundred serfs in pawn the worse." 
The career of this audacious poser, whose 
real name was plain Barry, begins in Ireland, 
where his family, he tells us, is of the highest 
rank and seated at a place called Barryville. 
As a mere boy he reveals that heartless addi- 
tion to pose, joined with absolute selfishness 
and a boastful faith in himself, which he con- 
tinues to reveal in every act of his life. His 



68 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

adventures include two terms of service as a 
soldier — one forced upon him by law and 
terminated by his desertion: the other brought 
about by kidnappers who entrap him into the 
army of Prussia — the discovery of his uncle, 
Chevalier de Balebari, a professional gambler 
of whom, thereafter, he is a confederate: a 
bold, brilliant and abominable course in the 
Duchy of X, where he and his uncle acquired 
influence through notes accepted by them at 
the gaming table, and where they laid a great 
scheme to force a marriage between Barry and 
the Countess Ida, a scheme that failed and in- 
volved them in the tragic episode of Duke 
Victor and his Duchess because of which they 
were driven from the duchy and wandered 
about Europe; at last, Barry came to England 
and made a match with the widowed Lady 
Lyndon whose name he assumed. 

From the moment of this great triumph for 
the adventurer, his star begins to decline, 
which fact is significant of the mood Thack- 
eray was in when he wrote the book. I have 
said that in his earlier novels the gambler and 
the schemer are the chief human causes of un- 
happiness. There is another cause, in those 
earlier novels, which is not human. It is 
fate. Later on, Thackeray was to change his 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 69 

point of view; the inward drama was to in- 
clude a victory over his belief in fate; but 
when he wrote Barry Lyndon, that time had 
not come. In 1846 he still felt that a malign 
fate had the best of it in this world. There- 
fore, though Barry Lyndon, like an evil con- 
queror, rides down the hearts of those that 
trust him, he is all the while going straight 
into the shadow of a giant cloud which he, in 
his blindness, cannot see. It is the cloud of 
Sorrow which, for Thackeray, at thirty-five, 
overhung the world. There comes a time 
when fate turns upon Barry Lyndon, when in 
spite of his audacity, all the fruits of his 
triumphs disappear; when accident dogs him 
like a shadow ; and our last view is of a broken, 
dispirited, unhappy man borne down by all 
conquering sorrow. 

Again, as in connection with the Snob 
Papers we should notice that Thackeray hits 
his vein artistically in the vengeful expression 
of a bitter point of view. But again we are im- 
pressed by his deficient instinct for the mat- 
ter, his slight understanding of his audience. 
What the audience would take, in small doses 
mixed with humour in the Snob Papers, they 
rejected without conditions when presented to 
them in a great mass without humour to sweet- 



70 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

en it. The Snob Papers comprise forty-four 
ironic miniatures ; each one portraying a single 
aspect of meanness. The Luck of Barry Lyn- 
don forms one stupendous monument. The 
former we can accept, one by one, without feel- 
ing that the world is bad. The latter, so far 
as subject goes, is one great arch of darkness. 
To care for it we must be able — either by 
temperament or training — to follow Thack- 
eray at his desk precisely as he followed J. J. 
at his easel; we must enter into the difficulties 
of the undertaking; estimate with accuracy the 
forces he can put into the field; comprehend 
the generalship with which he uses them. 
Few people read books in this way, and Barry 
Lyndon was submitted to an audience which 
was peculiarly incapable of doing so. It was 
an audience which, with good right, was grow- 
ing weary of the prophets of despair, and was 
crying out either to be amused or be made 
hopeful. Therefore it had turned to the in- 
flexible but buoyant Dickens, who, in that 
weary and disillusioned nineteenth century 
was the literary general of the forces of hope. 
Therein lay the secret of his great influence. 
He was really a gigantic pamphleteer who 
organised the cheerfulness of his time and led 
an assault upon the citadel of despair. When 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 71 

almost every one else was hopeless ; when Car- 
lyle, in the tones of an expiring tempest was 
thundering to the world that our mission is 
but to endure and die; when Tennyson, melo- 
diously miserable, could not make hope ro- 
bust; when all the voices of revolt were re- 
peating Shelley — 

"The world is weary of the past, 
Oh might it die or rest at last — " 

when all this was going on, no wonder the 
average man valued Dickens as he valued sun- 
shine, and gave little heed to a novelist who 
had not yet broken away from the wailing 
chorus of the voices of woe, whose book was 
a despairing epic on the lordship of evil over 
life, the lordship of Sorrow over all. 



CHAPTER IV 

VANITY FAIR 

IN 1846, Thackeray could not longer en- 
dure the separation from his children. 
He took a house, 13 Young Street, Ken- 
sington, brought his children thither and went 
to work on Vanity Fair. In that house, dur- 
ing 1846 and 1847, almost all of the book was 
written. 

Though Vanity Fair is probably the chief 
support of his reputation with the general 
reader, it is the least Thackerean, in certain 
respects, of all his books. It presents several 
curious problems, of which the most obvious, 
and also the easiest to solve, is the presence 
of two distinct sorts of humour. One we rec- 
ognise as Thackeray's own ; the other is an in- 
truder. It is so well marked, however, that 
we have no trouble determining whence it 
crept into the fold. The influence of Dickens 
has borne fruit and it is Dickens' humour 
which is the alien element in Vanity Fair. 

To characterise either sort in a word, or a 
72 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 73 

phrase, is a risky matter. And yet, if one 
should venture to do so, one might say that 
the humour of Dickens is pre-eminently the 
humour of the inconsequent. In Dickens we 
get inured to the gymnastics of feeling, we see 
emotions performing on the high wire, we 
listen to the roar of the pit and grow dizzy at 
a succession of lightening' transformations. 
An idea starts out in a guise which we think 
we recognise, toward a goal which we think we 
see, and then — high presto! — by a change too 
quick to detect, it has shuffled into another 
garb and we must grin at our fooled expecta- 
tions. 

In the true Thackerean humour there is 
something which is harder to phrase. Its sur- 
prises are not inconsequent. What makes us 
smile is not the sudden capering of ideas but, 
rather, an unforeseen bathing of them in 
strange light. One is forced back upon the 
hackneyed similitude of the sunshine rifting 
through clouds. But like a certain sort of ac- 
tual sunshine — whose peculiar brilliancy, the 
gift of unfallen rain, has in it something wist- 
ful, something prophetic of its end — so the sun- 
shine of Thackeray's humour glimmers across 
unshed tears. 

I may be yielding to a temptation to clear 



74 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

Thackeray at the expense of Dickens, but 
surely it was not Thackeray's true self that 
sprinkled Vanity Fair with its bad puns. It 
was not the Thackeray of the XXXth chapter 
who wrote "what is the rack in the punch at 
night to the rack in the head of a morning?" 
Dickens for all his greatness — and we should 
be on our guard nowadays to see justice done 
him — was capable of just that. What Dickens 
never could have done, what is Thackeray's 
normal vein, is such a remark as the delicious 
sneer, "it was only by her French being so 
good that you could know she was not a born 
woman of fashion." Furthermore, at many 
places in Vanity Fair, there is something not 
like the best of Thackeray in the choice of 
place for the introduction of burlesque. 
Many a time when we wish to come up square 
against fact and see the subject through our 
own eyes, the author intervenes and plays the 
part of a talking showman — as Dickens does — 
revealing to us not fact but an exaggerated 
version of it intended to be funny. A typical 
example is the introduction to the reader of 
Amelia Sedley who "could not only sing like 
a lark, or a Mrs. Billington, and dance like a 
Hillisberg or Parisot; and embroider beauti- 
fully; and spell as well as a dictionary itself; 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 75 

but she had such a kindly, smiling, tender, 
gentle, generous heart of her own, as won the 
love of everybody who came near her from 
Minerva herself down to the poor girl in the 
scullery and the one-eyed tart woman's 
daughter, who was permitted to vend her wares 
once a week to the young ladies of the Mall. 
She had twelve intimate and bosom friends 
out of twenty-four young ladies." 

No amount of writing such as this can make 
us sure that we have looked Amelia in the 
face. This is not portraiture but burlesque, 
not Thackeray but Dickens. It is worth no- 
ticing, however, that this vein gradually wears 
out as the book progresses. Emmy enters 
upon the scene as a puppet from the tiring 
room of Dickens but in the course of the per- 
formance she gradually becomes alive and by 
the time she makes her final exit she is a human 
being. 

In the first two-thirds of the book, at least, 
it would seem as if Thackeray, having 
awakened to his need of a model, had accepted 
Dickens without discriminating between his 
strength and his weakness. Perhaps this very 
lack of discrimination helped Vanity Fair 
with the crowd, for its laughable characters 
are sketched in those broad outlines so dear 



76 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

to the lover of Dickens. One hesitates to say 
that dear old Peggy O'Dowd is a closer kins- 
woman of Dickens than Thackeray; and yet, 
when one reflects how uniform is the impres- 
sion produced by her, how close she comes to 
being an embodied characteristic, how con- 
sistent she is, one cannot but recall the method 
of portraiture of such an immortal bit of 
grotesque as, say, Mrs. Harris. When we 
look at some other of Thackeray's feminine 
types, at Lady Jane, for example, are we quite 
persuaded that Mrs. Nickleby herself does not 
hide among their dresses at the back of a 
closet? Certainly, when we contrast Mrs. 
O'Dowd, or Lady Jane, with such a typical 
Thackerean as old Miss Crawley, the differ- 
ence in the temper and the method of delinea- 
tion is not to be denied. The two former, how- 
ever Thackeray came by them, are of the 
school of Dickens; the latter, like a piece of 
nature, transcends all schools and is Thack- 
eray's own. 

And yet, in certain respects, the school of 
Dickens was just what Thackeray needed, for 
Dickens, the supreme story teller, was espe- 
cially strong in those directions where Thack- 
eray was most weak. The knack of putting 
events together so as to form what will be 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 77 

called by the general reader a "good story" is 
the main secret of popular success and Thack- 
eray managed to do so just once. Vanity Fair 
is a "good story" — a good story of the school of 
Dickens. 

It is worth our while to observe the mere 
method by which the story is told. Becky, of 
course is the central figure and Amelia serves 
to illuminate her by contrast. The book opens 
with Becky's first matrimonial campaign in 
which under the protection of ineffectual little 
Amelia she lays seige to Amelia's hulking 
fool of a brother, Jos Sedley. Her scheme 
is foiled by Captain George Osborne for 
no reason but that he expects to marry 
Amelia and looks on Becky as an ad- 
venturess to whom he does not care to be 
related. Captain William Dobbin also had a 
hand in pulling Sedley out of danger. At the 
very start we see that Captain Dobbin is in love 
with Amelia; Captain Osborne, in love only 
with himself; while Amelia is in love with 
Love. Becky is entirely the mistress of her 
emotions. By the failure of this first cam- 
paign the group of people who were in sight 
as the curtain rose is broken up. Becky goes 
to Queens Crawley to be a governess there 
while Amelia remains at her home in Russell 



78 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

Square. For a time we pass back and forth 
between these two portions of the original 
group, and presently we are aware that in both 
portions the same event is coming forward. 
Before long it occurs. Each girl by her mar- 
riage sets her husband in opposition to tryan- 
nic selfishness and so loses him a fortune. 
Becky marries that famous buck, Rawdon 
Crawley, who is thereupon disinherited by his 
aunt, rich old Miss Crawley; Amelia marries 
George, whose father has quarrelled with old 
Sedley and now wishes to break off the match. 
George, having resisted his father, is also dis- 
inherited. Major Dobbin, silently devoted to 
Amelia, takes a chief part in bringing her mar- 
riage about. 

Now occurs an episode in which the leading 
persons of the original group again come to- 
gether and the duel of the opening episode is 
repeated with a variation. As both girls have 
married soldiers there is nothing forced in 
bringing them together at Brussels on the eve 
of Waterloo. We should remember here that 
in the opening episode Becky was driven off 
the field by George. At Brussels she again at- 
tacks him but with a new purpose. Since her 
defeat at his hands she has become an artful 
campaigner and has married a blackguard. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 79 

George, in love only with himself, is already 
tired of his child wife, and Becky flirts him un- 
der her thumb while her husband fleeces him 
at cards. George proposes to run off with her, 
and only his death at Waterloo saves Amelia 
from knowing. Thus Becky gets her first re- 
venge. 

Again the group breaks up and again we 
are kept in touch with both fragments. But 
this time, instead of reflecting they contrast 
each other. For both women, Waterloo was 
the crisis. Becky left Brussels confident in the 
power of her arts and bent upon being' a 
woman of fashion, come what might. Ame- 
lia, whose people had been ruined by the war, 
absorbed herself in the attempt — not always 
,well directed, for she was not a very wise lit- 
tle person — to do her duty. 

In each life, however, there was repeated 
that same duel with tyrannic selfishness in 
which both women became involved when 
they were married. Becky, after Waterloo, 
matched her wits against the great Marquis 
of Steyne with whom she sought to deal as 
previously with George Osborne. Amelia 
was challenged by another brutal egoist, her 
husband's father, for possession of her boy. 
In both cases the egoist won. Becky missed it 



80 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IX 

with Steync ; was found out by Rawdon ; and 
disappeared from view. Amelia, to save her 
child from poverty, gave him up to his grand- 
father. 

In course of time Dobbin, whose love for 
Amelia was as faithful as ever, came back 
from India where he had been in service, 
bringing Jos with him, and Amelia's fortunes 
began to mend. After awhile old Osborne 
died and Amelia and her son v/ere reunited. 
Still Dobbin loved Amelia and Amelia went 
on loving Love to which she gave the face of 
George. At last all these made a trip to Ger- 
many and at the little town of Pumpernickel 
whom should they come upon but Becky. 
Though holding to the fringe of respectability 
with a somewhat doubtful clutch she was still 
unalterably herself, still delightfully undis- 
mayed, and at once she resumed her influence 
over Amelia. Here, then, for the third time 
we have the original group and as the episode 
progresses the original issues — with final vari- 
ations — are repeated. Again there is the duel 
between Becky and George, this time for the 
deliverance of Amelia from his memory. 
Becky gets her crowning vengeance when by 
revealing George's perfidy at Brussels, she at 
last opens Amelia's eyes and thus the reign of 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 81 

that false saint is ended. However, Amelia 
had already discovered where she really stood 
and Dobbin was even then upon his way to 
claim her. The only remaining issue is the 
matter of Becky and Jos. The schemes which 
had failed long years before bear some sort 
of fruit at the end of the book and when we 
see Jos last he is wholly under Becky's influ- 
ence. 

The materials of the book have caused much 
discussion. Mrs. Ritchie is uncertain whether 
any particular person sat for the portrait of 
Becky. She more than half suspects, how- 
ever, that she once had a glimpse of Becky's 
original and writes of her thus: "One morn- 
ing a hansom drove up to the door and out 
of it there emerged the most charming, daz- 
zling little lady dressed in black, who greeted 
my father with great affection and brilliancy, 
and who, departing presently, gave my father 
a large bunch of fresh violets." At one time 
an absurd tale went about to the effect that 
Becky was Charlotte Bronte, and that Miss 
Bronte, to get even, pictured Thackeray in her 
character of Rochester. This was mere non- 
sense on both counts. If we are to find a lit- 
erary portrait of Thackeray, dating from 1847, 
we must look for it in his own book. And 



82 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

though we arc told that in John Allen, Arch- 
deacon of Salop, Thackeray got a hint for 
Dobbin, surely upon this point there is more 
to say. One must be near blindness not to 
see that if we subtract the genius from Wil- 
liam Thackeray as he was at thirty-seven and 
add a few disguises like big feet and an awk- 
ward manner we have a large part of the ma- 
terial of the patient major. Of Amelia, 
Thackeray said that he got hints of her from 
**his wife, his mother and Mrs. Brookfield.'^ 
The two persons in Vanity Fair whose origin 
is generally supposed to be established are 
Lord Steyne and his parasite Mr. Wenham. 

The former is supposed to have been studied 
from the Marquis of Hertford. That sin- 
gular nobleman was a person of much more 
versatility than Lord Steyne but in many 
respects their careers are identical. Like 
Steyne, Hertford was a gambler, both shrewd 
and daring; an abandoned sensualist, incapa- 
ble of permanent attachment to any creature; 
an unscrupulous egoist, overshadowed by the 
dread of inherited insanity. On the other 
hand when Lord Hertford was decorated with 
the Garter, Sir Robert Peel wrote, "I was 
really pleased at Lord Hertford getting the 
garter. I was pleased very disinterestedly, 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 83 

and for his own sake, merely, for I like him. 
He is a gentleman, and not an everyday one." 
The Duke of Wellington said of him that 
"had Hertford lived in London instead of 
frittering away his time in Paris, he would 
have become Prime Minister of England." 
Plainly there was a brilliant and attractive 
side to this vicious nobleman which Thack- 
eray omitted in composing Steyne. Taking 
only the bad side of Hertford, Thackeray has 
reared upon that base a colossal image of the 
brutal selfishness of the tyrannic male. A 
heavy, dominant, ruthless, heartless, dictato- 
rial, self-indulgent, overbearing despot — 
Steyne! It is this dreadful personality, the 
Prince of Egoists, who for Thackeray at thir- 
ty-seven was the lord of the world. In him 
all the evils of egoism culminated making a 
vast symbol of successful selfishness which 
might well be called Beelzebub. 

According to report another famous egoist, 
Disraeli's Monmouth was also studied from 
Lord Hertford. Mr. Whibley, ever ready to 
cast a stone at Thackeray, undertakes to show 
that Disraeli's portrait is far the more suc- 
cessful, and would dispose of Steyne as be- 
ing chiefly "a matter of buck teeth" and bad 
manners. There is some truth in the sneer. 



84 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

The lover of Thackeray would like to have 
Steyne less a monster, more a merely wicked 
human. But Mr. Whibley need not have 
gone out of his way to produce a rival to 
Steyne and by implication set Disraeli in 
higher place. If we turn from Steyne to 
Thackeray's later version of the same idea, to 
Lord Ringwood, in Philip, we see that with 
time the melodramatic in Thackeray disap- 
peared. Again, the real explanation is sim- 
ply that in Vanity Fair he is always near the 
shadow of Dickens. That shadow is coming 
and going everywhere across the book and at 
times falls heavily upon the figure of Steyne. 
To pass from the Marquis to his creature, 
we come to another of Mr. Whibley's op- 
portunities. In Coningsby, Disraeli drew a 
portrait labelled Nicholas Rigby, which is 
really a study of John Wilson Croker, who 
was also the original of Wenham in Vanity 
Fair. "While Steyne is overshadowed by 
Monmouth," writes Mr. Whibley, "Wenham 
is completely eclipsed by Rigby." He de- 
votes five and a half pages to the relative mer- 
its of the three persons, Croker, Rigby and 
Wenham, always with an eye to the disparage- 
ment of Thackeray. When we recall that 
Wenham is a very minor character, very 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 85 

lightly sketched ; that he emerges into promi- 
nence only once, and then merely as agent of 
Steyne to smooth things over with Mrs. Craw- 
ley's husband ; it is hard to see why Mr. Whib- 
ley should make so much pother about him. 
Perhaps we are tempted by an uncharitable 
suspicion that Mr. Whibley, like so many of 
the seekers after "origins," is betrayed in mak- 
ing much of trifling discoveries not because 
they throw light on Thackeray but because 
they show the cleverness of the trifler. In 
fact Mr. Whibley gives his hand away and 
cuts the ground from beneath his feet by two 
incautious sentences. He says of Wenham, 
"the portrait in brief, has neither the force 
nor the rascality which distinguish Mr. Nich- 
olas Rigby, the villain of Coningsby, after 
whom rather than after nature it seems to 
have been drawn." Again he says, "Thack- 
eray, when he sketched Wenham, had in his 
mind's eye the conventional portrait of John 
Wilson Croker." Had Mr. Whibley been 
seeking disinterestedly to form an estimate of 
Thackeray, these remarks, with perhaps an- 
other or two, would have served his turn. 
But his animus will not let him rest. Though 
he declares that Wenham is drawn "after Rig- 
by rather than after nature," and that in doing 



86 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

so Thackeray used a "conventional portrait," 
he goes on to cry Thackeray down because 
he did not see fit to make a study of the re- 
mote original from which this conventional 
portrait derived. The truth of the matter is 
simply that Thackeray, in a novel of sixty- 
seven chapters, introduces a character whose 
function is to be in sight around the edge of 
the scene, do a single mean act and figure 
prominently in just one chapter. In so slight 
a part Thackeray can afiford to imitate Shake- 
speare, as well as almost every other novelist 
and playwright that ever lived, and without 
troubling himself to create a character, use a 
stock type. He does so. The same stock 
property had been used shortly before by an- 
other brilliant novelist "after whom rather 
than after nature," Thackeray's sketch seems 
to have been drawn. 

Setting aside these comparatively small 
ones among the problems presented by Vanity 
Fair we approach another which is not small. 
How are we to account for the buoyant tone 
of the book? Why is it that Vanity Fair, 
coming right on the heels of Barry Lyndon, 
that masterpiece of dreariness, has a dash and 
"go" that sweeps us along irresistibly? 

There is nothing in Thackeray's personal 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 87 

life to account for the accession of spirit that 
enlivens Vanity Fair. He was still lonely to 
an extreme. He still brooded upon life with 
the same passionate appreciation of its evil 
and its sorrow. When we look close into Van- 
ity Fair we perceive that its buoyancy does 
not rest on that part of the book in which the 
mere man as distinguished from the craftsman 
is revealed. In this case Dickens did not in- 
fluence him and the contrast with Dickens 
helps us toward a clue, for the buoyancy 
which we find in Dickens is based upon that 
part of him which lies beneath the artist, on 
the man's personal conviction of what life sig- 
nifies, his conviction that in the long run 
things somehow straighten themselves out; 
that though God works in a mysterious way, 
still, even in this life, God is here helping us 
inscrutably toward our salvation. But in 
Vanity Fair all the underlying conviction as 
to how things happen in life is either hope- 
less or ironical. Episode after episode, 
though we have laughed over it as it pro- 
gressed, ends in failure. Even the end of all, 
the glimpse we get of Dobbin and Amelia 
married, is unsatisfying. It hints that Dob- 
bin did not rise to our expectations. The very 
last we hear of Amelia is a sigh. And the 



88 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

book ends with those famous but — even 
though Thackeray wrote them — unmanly 
words: "Ah! Vanitas VanitatumI which of 
us is happy in this world? Which of us has 
his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? — Come, 
children, let us shut up the box and the pup- 
pets, for our play is played out." 

No, the buoyancy of Vanity Fair is not a 
matter of the point of view. We are still in 
the second act of Thackeray's spiritual drama, 
and not yet is there light in his darkened 
heaven. In order to reach the secret of the 
buoyancy we must leave for the moment the 
ordinary way of looking at a novel and take 
up something, at least, of Thackeray's own at- 
titude toward J. J. We must turn back to 
Barry Lyndon, put its subject out of our heads 
and look at it purely as a piece of style. Hav- 
ing once brought ourselves to this point of 
view we shall be startled by the impression 
which we receive. We shall become aware, 
throughout that stern book, of a rising tide of 
artistic self-confidence which before we had 
missed. We see now, that as Thackeray went 
forward with that great undertaking he dis- 
covered his powers; as difficulty after diffi- 
culty went down before him, routed horse and 
foot, he came first to believe in, and then to 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 89 

exult in, his artistic destiny. To take a meta- 
phor from the life of Napoleon, Barry Lyn- 
don was Thackeray's campaign in Italy. 

We now have the secret of the buoyancy of 
Vanity Fair. It is the sheer "joy of the work- 
ing," that first enthusiasm over his own initia- 
tion into technical mastery, which has come to 
every great artist at a certain point in his 
career; has made distinctive what the critics 
call his "first manner"; and then has left him. 
In the case of Thackeray this discovery of a 
technical enthusiasm must have had double 
significance, because, for the moment, it must 
have delivered him from himself. In the na- 
ture of things the "joy of the working" — in 
this limited sense — cannot last very long for 
the charm of it is based upon surprise, but 
while it lasts it is one of the most powerful 
stimulants in the world. If the evidence of 
the mere writing counts for anything, Thack- 
eray worked this stimulant to the full in 
Vanity Fair. 

It is this buoyancy of the mere craftsman 
which permeates the book; which moves 
everywhere as if in flashes of light among, 
those stern ideas which still remain fixed ini 
Thackeray's mind, which the joy of the work- 
ing is powerless to change, but around which 



90 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

it spins an illusory atmosphere of flashes. 
Thus it comes about that when we have 
learned to see through this brilliant effect of 
style — for that is all it is — we see that the stem 
ideas are still there in unchanged grimness 
and only to our dazzled eyes have their out- 
lines appeared to be softened — like ugly things 
beautified by dawn. We see that here, just 
as truly as in Barry Lyndon, colossal egoism 
dominates the scene. We see goodness linked 
always with futility; evil, splendid and trium- 
phant; and over all, Sorrow like an emperor. 
The very heart of the book is in that final 
cry, "which of us is happy in this world?" 

Having trained our eyes so that we can see 
clearly through the dawn shimmer of the style 
of Vanity Fair, we perceive within that shim- 
mer a procession of egoists who incarnate the 
mercilessness of fate. The procession opens 
with George Osborne, who is followed by that 
larger edition of the same thing, his repulsive 
father; behind them come the two Crawleys, 
Pitt and his Aunt; alongside whom moves the 
detestable Mrs. Bute Crawley and her drink- 
ing husband; and the odious Lord and Lady 
Bareacres; until the series culminates in the 
great Steyne. 

They are all described so aptly, with such 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 91 

graceful deliberation — as if the writer thought 
of nothing but how to phrase them — that we 
catch for the moment his apparent detachment 
and forget to think upon their significance. 
When, however, we grow familiar with the 
phrasing, the question of significance asserts 
itself, and then we catch the tune to which the 
procession moves. It is a dead march wailing, 
"Which of us is happy in this world?" And 
the dead march is not merely over the victims 
whom the colossi trample beneath their feet. 
The egoists themselves are no happier than 
the rest. All are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. 
"Which of us has his desire?" is the dirge for 
the fallen, blending immediately with the re- 
quiem over the victors — "or having it is satis- 
fied?" 

Were it not that we catch from the author 
some portion of his own joy of the working, — 
which is here so potent that it infects us with- 
out our being aware, — this procession of the 
egoists would be intolerable. That same in- 
fection is all that enables us to look calmly 
upon the fallen. When we strip them of the 
wonderful style by which they are enrobed 
we are tempted to say they come nearer, even 
than the egoists, to being Thackeray's con- 
demnation. Every one of them lacks either 



92 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

force or charm. Not one of them has any 
appreciable effect upon the course of events. 
The battle of life rides over them and goes on 
and they are left among the lumber. Amelia, 
Dobbin, the poor old Sedleys, neglected Lady 
Steyne, persecuted Lady Gaunt, kindly Lady 
Jane, even great hearted Peggy O'Dow^d and 
her brave Mick, are all ineffectual. Imagine 
what Vanity Fair would be, were Dobbin 
withdrawn from it and in his place put a 
strong, vehement and intrepid goodness — a 
man as bold as Steyne. Unfortunately, for 
Thackeray, at thirty-seven, that could not be. 
People to be loved, to be protected, to be wept 
over, but not to be relied upon beyond a cer- 
tain point, are the goodnesses of Vanity Fair. 
Not among them is the courage that burns its 
ships, the intense concentration that goes blind 
to its own peril, the indomitable energy whose 
recoil when it is denied an outlet spells de- 
struction. Steyne, evil as he was, had some- 
thing of these qualities. Dobbin with all his 
virtues had none of them. 

But to resume upon the "joy of the work- 
ing." The final monument of it, the real rea- 
son why Vanity Fair survives, is yet to be 
named. It is well at this point to turn our 
eyes for an instant to that earlier, happier, 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 93 

more triumphant artist, to Shakespeare. In 
him we discern the clear limits of a ^'first man- 
ner." We mark off that period in his life 
when he like Thackeray was intoxicated by his 
own power to do things. We see how the 
throb of his joy, seeking a perfect vehicle for 
its expression, singled out and made immortal 
that part of himself which was most in tune 
with it. The result was one of the greatest 
love poems ever written. To the measureless 
good fortune of all after time, Shakes- 
peare, in his first manner, had still an 
unclouded heaven, he devoutly believed 
in Love, was not the least afraid of Death, 
and had an almost boyish faith in the final 
rightness of everything. Therefore, his first 
rnanner culminates in Juliet. 

How different was Thackeray's mood we 
have seen. But he, also, like Shakespeare, like 
every great artist in this stage of his develop- 
ment, longed to fashion a creature who should 
incarnate the great qualities that were just then 
active in himself. To do so, it was necessary 
that he find a character of a sort he could be- 
lieve in, whose wrestle with life was as daunt- 
less as his own wrestle with artistic difficulties. 
Had he been happy, had he been Shakespeare, 
he would have found in his memory some 



94 - THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

glorious figure of unfaltering love; had he 
been bravely sad — which alas I we must admit 
he was not — his memory would have yielded 
to him some image of noble sacrifice. Being 
what he was, he found an image in which the 
buoyancy, the audacity, the fortitude, of the 
artist were translated, neither into love nor 
sacrifice, but into worldliness. He named 
this image Becky Sharp. 

And what a wonderful image it is! How 
gallantly the little adventuress matched her 
wits against the world. With what courage 
she went alone on her campaigns! How 
firmly she kept up her spirits. Never once did 
she falter. Defeat could not break her down. 
Fearless, gay, self-reliant, she wrote "fortune 
my foe!" on her banner, and when everything 
she cared for was on the cast, played her hand 
without trembling. The cards were always 
against her; the advantage of the ground was 
always with the other side; in none of her 
greater campaigns did she have an ally; al- 
ways her enemies had enormous odds; and 
yet, not once did she lose heart. And her 
equanimity never rested on indifiference. She 
is one of the most tense characters in fiction. 
The bow is strung every minute of her career. 
No general in the midst of a great campaign, 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 95 

no politician when the fate of his party is in 
the balance, no lover who is engrossed in his 
passion, could pursue an ideal with more un- 
compromising devotion. With the ardour of a 
true lover she saw in her mind's eye the sub- 
stance of things hoped for; with the courage 
of a great soldier she went gallantly to the at- 
tack, laughing at her immense disadvantage; 
with the heroism of a strong mind she forbade 
herself a single instant of the luxury of self- 
pity. 

And now for the other side of the picture: 
if only Becky could have been good! Or, to 
come at it the other way round, think what 
Vanity Fair would be did some of its good 
people share her power. Think of Dobbin 
with 'Becky's audacity; Amelia with Becky's 
charm. 

Yes, and think what Becky herself might 
have been had fortune been on her side; think 
of the part she might have played as a grande 
dame. Her intuitive sense of proportion, her 
natural delicacy — I had almost said her nat- 
ural purity — her courage, her amiability, her 
lack of malice, her poise, her serenity, her 
charm — these are what we should have known 
in Becky had she changed places in youth with, 
say, Lady Mary Caerlyon. Had she, and not 



96 THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 

that sweet futility become the Marchioness of 
Steyne we should be celebrating to-day, the 
skill, the audacity, the devotion, with which 
she played her husband's hand and at last made 
him a Duke and Prime Minister. 

But in Vanity Fair, this cannot be. Here, 
nothing must go right. Becky, the supreme 
opportunist, can be a good woman on ten thou- 
sand a year but has not the stuff to be good in 
adversity. Therefore, she must have adversity 
for her portion so that Life may break and ruin 
her, for such is the function of life in Vanity 
Fair. The constant limitation in Thackeray's 
first manner is the obligation in his own mind 
to make everybody fail. He will not spare 
his most brilliant creation, not even this 
"dauntless worldling" whose wealth of sheer 
courage is the chief factor in keeping his book 
alive. When everything has been allowed for, 
and we come to the conclusion of the whole 
matter, we find that it is this : Vanity Fair is a 
great but mournful symphony built in every 
part on the one theme, "Which of us is happy 
in this world?" 



CHAPTER V 

END OF THE FIRST MANNER 

THE custom of issuing novels in 
monthly numbers had been made 
popular by Dickens and was followed 
by Thackeray. The first number of Vanity 
Fair appeared in January, 1847; the last one 
in July, 1848. The tradition is that he re- 
ceived fifty guineas a number. 

Vanity Fair did not immediately capture its 
audience and the opening numbers were neg- 
lected. Very soon, however, its great quali- 
ties began to be appreciated. In September, 
1847, Mrs. Carlyle wrote to her husband that 
it was "very good indeed" and "beats Dickens 
out of the world." In January, 1848, the 
earlier numbers were reviewed by Abraham 
Hayward, in The Edinburgh, and highly 
praised as "immeasureably superior to all 
Thackeray's previous work." By this time the 
public generally held a similar view and 
people were talking of Thackeray as a great 
novelist. In May, 1848, Monckton Milnes 

97 



98 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

wrote that he was "winning a great social suc- 
cess, dining at the Academy with Sir Robert 
Peel." Trollope writes, "in that year 1848 his 
name becomes common in the memoirs of the 
time. On the 5th of June I find him dining 
with Macready to meet Sir J. Wilson, Panizzi, 
Landseer, and others." The same year Mac- 
ready notes that he "dined with Forster, having 
called and taken up Brookfield, met Rintoul, 
Kenyon, Proctor, Kinglake, Alfred Tennyson, 
Thackeray." In the same year, 1848, a testi- 
monial was sent to the rising genius from that 
city of Edinburgh which had done such honour 
to Dickens seven years before. Eighty Scotch 
admirers including Dr. John Brown, the au- 
thor of Rab and His Friends, presented 
Thackeray with a silver ink stand. It will be 
remembered that he was thirty-seven in July, 
1848, and that the last number of Vanity Fair 
appeared the same month. At thirty-seven, 
then, Thackeray had "arrived." 

He took his success quite simply and natu- 
rally. He dined with the Duchess of Bedford, 
or the Duke of Devonshire, or Peel, or Lands- 
downe, and was frankly pleased to be made 
much of by the great. Of course silly people 
have sneered at him, and tried to show that he 
should have made a niche for himself in his 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 99 

gallery of Snobs. As if the world's recogni- 
tion of a hard fought victory should not stir a 
man's blood! Thackeray was above such 
affectation. He neither pretended to despise 
his fame nor allowed it to make a fool of him. 
He did not forget that his business was to write 
books and to keep on writing books. But none 
the less he was set up in spirit because that 
merciless London "Society," which had no re- 
gard for any but them of power and influence, 
set its stamp on his success. He sums up his 
feeling in those two oft-repeated sentences 
upon Lady C, — "beautiful serene, stupid old 
lady . . . she asked, 'Isn't that the great 
Mr. Thackeray?' O! my stars, think of 
that!" 

Two of the most singular details of his life 
fell in at this time when he had but newly 
"arrived." He seems to have had an almost 
morbid fear of not providing adequately for 
his children and to have undervalued the hold 
he had got on the public. He dreaded an 
abandonment by that fickle mistress. We 
see, in all this, the same oversensitiveness 
which led him in his earlier books to luxu- 
riate in unhappiness, which led him now to 
brood upon the possible catastrophe that 
might lie hid in the future. Under stress of 



100 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

his solicitude, he forgot to judge himself by 
the standard he set up for the world. This is 
what explains a move made in May, 1848, 
when Thackeray got himself called to the bar 
at the Middle Temple. The apparently 
pointless procedure — for he does not seem 
to have had the least idea of practising — ap- 
pears to be explained by the fact that shortly 
afterward Monckton Milnes made an attempt 
to get him appointed a London Magistrate. 
For Thackeray, the satirist of placemen and 
pensioners, to become a magistrate through 
sheer ''pull" would have been too bad and the 
ill judged attempt fortunately failed. The 
same fate overtook another piece of incon- 
sistency. Trollope relates that Thackeray had 
become acquainted with the Postmaster Gen- 
eral, Lord Clanricarde. In 1848, the place 
of assistant secretary at the General Post Office 
became vacant and Lord Clanricarde wished 
to give it to Thackeray. Says Trollope, "Lord 
Clanricarde either ofifered it to him or prom- 
ised to give it to him." But his lordship had 
reckoned without his host. His political as- 
sociates protested. Thackeray knew nothing 
of the business of the post office and if ap- 
pointed would come in over the heads of men 
of tried experience. There was such vigor- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 101 

ous opposition to his appointment that Lord 
Clanricarde did not stand to his guns and the 
matter was dropped. 

A more proper incident was the appearance 
in November, 1848, of the first number of 
Pendennis. Thackeray worked upon the book 
as it came out, keeping ahead of the publishers 
as best he could, and this accounts for a break 
in the publication during 1849. Thackeray 
fell ill and came near to death but was saved 
by his admirable physician. Dr. John Elliot- 
son, whose name he has immortalised in the 
grateful dedication of Pendennis. 

This brilliant novel makes an end of Thack- 
eray's first manner. Barry Lyndon, Vanity 
Fair and Pendennis, these three form a group. 
They are united by that "joy of the working," 
which Thackeray discovered in Barry Lyn- 
don; by means of which he rose to such 
heights in Vanity Fair; and upon which, like 
an eagle sailing with spread wings out of the 
morning, he rested in Pendennis. 

The success of Vanity Fair and the artistic 
confidence sprung from that success had borne 
immediate fruit. From that time forward 
Thackeray trusted himself as an artist. He 
threw off — in most respects for good: in some, 
perhaps not — the influence of Dickens. Cer- 



102 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

tain things with which he had forced himself 
to wrestle in Vanity Fair, he let go. The 
whole of his attention was now centred upon 
those phrases of his art which appealed 
peculiarly to his temperament, upon the style, 
the details, the portraiture. The general plan 
he neglected. 

Contrasting Pendennis with Vanity Fair 
the difference between the two is very notable. 
From Pendennis, the burlesque tone, the ex- 
aggeration of characteristics, the straining to 
be funny — the Dickens elements in the style — 
have all disappeared. Real people step forth 
from the page and look us square in the eye. 
When Thackeray talks himself he is but one 
of the company: no longer the genial show- 
man interposing his whimsical version of 
things between us and the fact. But, also, 
there is the other side to the change. All that 
sustained attempt to relate everything to every- 
thing else, to make it all tell in developing a 
central theme, has for the present disappeared. 
There is hardly a beginning; certainly no 
middle; and the end would seem but a mat- 
ter of space. "We have run far enough," the 
author seems to say, "let us end." 

The story has but one thread like a loosely 
knit biography. Pen was born and his father 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 103 

and mother were so-and-so; he went to school 
at the Charterhouse; his father died while 
he was at school; he came home and had a 
tutor; he was the apple of his mother's eye; 
he fell in love, as he thought, with the beauti- 
ful Miss Fotheringay, the daughter of Cap- 
tain Costigan, of Costiganstown, Ireland, de- 
scended of kings, but at present supporting 
her father by her labour as an actress; he was 
pulled out of the scrape by his worldly old 
uncle, the Major; he was sent off to college, 
at Oxbridge; he was rather gay there and 
spent more than he had; he was later sent to 
the Temple where he grew intimate with 
George Warrington; he had his little flirta- 
tion with little Fanny Bolton; he nearly died 
of a fever; he sidled away from law into litera- 
ture; he had a long absurd and unnecessary 
flirtation with Blanche Amory; there was a 
misunderstanding between himself and his 
mother; it was made up; at last he succeeded; 
finally he had sense enough to get his eyes open 
and ask Laura who is ten times too good for 
him but whom we have known all along was 
being kept in reserve to make a proper finale 
as the curtain falls. 

The rambling course of the narrative makes 
possible the introduction of all sorts of in- 



104 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

cidents. For example, there is the story of 
the French cook Alcide Merabolant, who was 
in love with Blanche and declared his passion 
through his tarts and got into various troubles. 
There is Chevalier Strong and his queer ways 
of living — "Ned" Strong as he was called — 
who held the office of general concilia- 
tor in the household of the perfectly 
worthless Sir Frances Clavering and his 
vulgar, good-hearted, much abused wife, 
who had an Indian fortune and was called 
"the Begum." Like Wenham and Wagg, in 
Vanity Fair, and others later, Ned Strong is a 
professional toady and hanger-on. He lives 
ofif his patron, conducts a hundred bits of 
shady business for him, and is generally a 
parasite. Then there is the unfortunate 
Harry Foker, a better hearted version of 
young James Crawley of Vanity Fair who 
was so skilfully euchered out of the game by 
his uncle the worthy Pitt. There is a group 
of literary "gents," Paternoster Row people, 
scribbling adventurers. This group was a 
stock property with Thackeray and was re- 
peated almost man for man in Philip. They 
are extremely entertaining and there can be 
little doubt that in creating them Thack- 
eray drew on his memory. What happened to 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 105 

Pen and Philip in their attempts to get started 
as writers pretty certainly had happened be- 
fore to William Thackeray. 

Naturally attempts have been made to dis- 
cover originals for these "gents." This is the 
sort of thing in which Mr. Whibley, like that 
famous character in Dickens, "comes out 
strong." A dozen of his pages are devoted 
to a discussion of Thackeray's Grub Street. 
"Bungay," says Mr. Whibley, "is an unami- 
able portrait of Colburn the publisher, while 
Archer ... is none other than Tom Hill 
of the Monthly Mirror. . . ." Shandon is 
a portrait of Maginn that talented Irishman 
who turned Chevy Chase into Latin, Homer 
into an English ballad and "from a garret in 
Wych Street" sent forth a prospectus of "the 
whole art and mystery of writing a paper," 
much as Shandon did from the Fleet prison. 

In connection with Pendennis a. charge is 
made by Mr. Whibley which having been 
brought, must be reckoned with. In his eager- 
ness to decry Thackeray, he brings into court, 
as a witness of the Englishman's inferiority, 
none other than Balzac. Pendennis, says Mr. 
Whibley, "has the same motive as Tom Jones, 
Gil Bias, Le Pere Goriot. In other words 
it describes the impact of an enterprising ad- 



106 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

venturous youth upon the world. But unlike 
the heroes of the other masterpieces I have 
mentioned, Pendennis moves in a formal little 
circle not of his own choosing. His ad- 
ventures are limited not merely by his 
lack of courage, but by a narrow ruth- 
less convention of life. From the very 
first he is taken charge of by the tyrants of 
habit and custom. He is pushed along the 
common groove from school to college, from 
college to London, until he reaches the com- 
fortable goal of fiction — a blameless marriage. 
When Rastignac emerged from the humble 
boarding house near the Pantheon, he was for- 
tified by the predatory philosophy of Vautrin 
to make war upon society. Pendennis found 
a mentor more circumspect than Rastignac's. 
His Vautrin was the admirable Major whose 
cynicism conceived nothing worse than an en- 
trance into the best houses and a rich alliance. 
But while Rastignac remains a triumph of 
romantic portraiture, Pendennis ends as he be- 
gan, an intelligent meritorious young gentle- 
man." To Mr. Whibley's way of thinking the 
contrast between Vautrin and Major Pen- 
dennis should lead us to "understand the dif- 
ference not merely between the talent of 
Balzac and the talent of Thackeray, but some- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 107 

thing of the difference between France and 
England." 

In these passages occurs more than one mis- 
representation into which so clever a man as 
Mr. Whibley would not have been betrayed 
except through partisanship. To begin with 
there is his misuse of "motive." By a literary 
motive we mean, of course, that idea in which 
is contained the secret of a book's individ- 
uality. Obviously this must be something 
distinctive. No loose, general idea, capable of 
being stated a hundred different ways, can 
with justice be called a literary motive. To 
get at the motive of a book we must pare down 
and make detailed our large vague impres- 
sions and thus, at last, detect that special in- 
tention lying back of the book by reason of 
which it is separated from all others. For 
example, if we said that the motive of "Romeo 
and Juliet" was youthful love we should be 
little nearer the fact than if we said that the 
motive of the play was human life. Both 
statements are hopelessly vague. If we said 
that "Romeo and Juliet," "The Eve of St. 
Agnes" and "The Day Dream" all had the 
same motive, because all deal with the beauty 
of youthful love, we should be talking non- 
sense. In each poem, the poet has made so 



108 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

delicate, so individual, the idea which he has 
to express, that the similarities of the three 
are effaced by their differences. The same 
may be said of the four books lumped together 
by Mr. Whibley. To say that Pendennis, 
Tom Jones, Gil Bias and Le Pere Goriot all 
have "the same motive," and that this motive 
may be expressed in so loose and vague a 
phrase as "the impact of an enterprising, ad- 
venturous youth upon the world," is to fling 
away all accuracy of description. We might 
as well say that every young man leads the 
same life as every other because in every case 
worth mentioning we have "the impact of an 
enterprising, adventurous youth upon the 
world." We should then demand that Mr. 
Whibley enlarge his group of the brethren 
of Pendennis and include about a thousand 
plays, poems and novels, beginning with the 
Iliad which records the impact upon the 
world of an enterprising adventurous youth 
named Achilles and coming down even to 
Captains Courageous in which, according to 
Mr. Whibley's reasoning, we find the same 
motive as in Homer. 

The contrast between Thackeray and 
Balzac is so point blank that no one will ques- 
tion it. The strange thing is why anybody 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 109 

should lug it into court. To belabour Thack- 
eray because Pen is not Rastignac is neither 
more nor less in point than to denounce Balzac 
for not being Homer. To say that in the con- 
trast between the Major and Vautrin is a clue 
not merely to the difference of the two novel- 
ists but of the two nations is fantastic to de- 
gree. The task of candid biography in con- 
nection with Pendennis, as with all the novels, 
is simply to account for it, to locate in the ex- 
perience of the author the source of its ideas. 
When that has been done the motive of the 
book may be formulated far more accurately 
than by an unsympathetic comparison with a 
masterpiece of a totally different sort. 

We have seen in what mood and under 
what conditions Thackeray worked upon 
Pendennis. At a time when he gave very 
little thought to his matter, and put almost if 
not quite his whole strength upon the manner, 
he tried to follow up Vanity Fair by a lighter, 
more graceful work. For materials he 
plunged into his memory, that enormous scrap 
book of odds and ends, and drew from it a 
great variety of diverting recollections. But 
with these, unfortunately — as we shall see in a 
moment — came up once more his gloomy and 
pessimistic views of life, his sentimentality. 



110 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

Publishing the thing piecemeal and work- 
ing on it from hand to mouth, under compul- 
sion to fill a certain amount of space each 
month, he made no attempt to join all the parts 
into a consistent whole, dominated through- 
out by a central idea. To make up for this 
lack, he redoubled his attention to detail, rely- 
ing mainly upon that mastery of style which 
he saw he had attained. Obviously, of a book 
so conceived and so executed, we cannot say, 
even though it contain the adventures of a 
young man, that its literary motive is "the 
impact of an enterprising, adventurous youth 
upon the world," or consider for a minute the 
grouping of its hero with Achilles and Rastig- 
nac. The real motive of the book is lyrical 
rather than epic; the mood of the author, not 
the hero's adventures, is the genuine subject. 
This is the reason why the charm of 
Pendennis is mainly in the details. Again the 
clue to it all is the style and in the best part 
of Pendennis we have the height, as we have 
the end, of Thackeray's first manner. Here 
the ideas glide easily, with no "fussing under 
the bows" — as they say of a ship that cuts 
smoothly and steadily through the sea. The 
thought passes into our minds so delicately, 
with so little commotion, that it has become 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 111 

part of us before we have will to question. 
What we notice chiefly in the effect of it is a 
constant element of not disquieting surprise. 
Every little while comes an easy turn of some 
sort, there flashes up within us something 
charmingly unusual and we find ourselves 
thinking about things as we never had expected 
to do. The best of these little surprises in our- 
selves is that they always seem to come natu- 
rally and when once they have occurred we 
feel they are all that ought to occur. 

At first blush we get from all this, as from 
the style in Vanity Fair — even more so, in fact, 
for this is still better done — a general impres- 
sion that the book is gay. Careless people are 
deceived and put it down for one of the gayest 
novels in the language. But look close and 
see what is behind the gaiety. Listen with 
the inward ear and catch the meaning of its 
accent. Is it of the mind or of the heart? Is 
there anything here of the young Shakespeare? 
Is it not, after all, that same illusion of the 
manner of saying things, of the mere style, that 
deceived us in Vanity Fair? 

By now we should have grown used to the 
shimmer of this wonderful style and should be 
able to see through it. Doing so we perceive 
a widely different world from that of the 



112 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

lordly youths of Shakespeare — Romeo, Or- 
lando, Henry V. Here, youth is not a con- 
queror. Far from it. The gallant blunder, the 
brave folly, the chivalrous misconception, 
the attractive v^^eakness — it is among these that 
the modern stylist takes his jaunty course, 
beckoning us to follow. What deceived us at 
first blush wsls the airy lightness of his step. 
Surely, we thought, one who walks so gaily, 
so debonairly, must be going to a wedding. 
But did not French ladies trip lightly up the 
steps of the guillotine? We have heard how 
they practised it, by means of a chair upon a 
table, in their prison yards. And if some 
heroic little countess who had done that 
ghastly rehearsal without a fault of grace, 
cried gaily to her fellow prisoners for their 
applause, may she not have been holding back 
the tears and saying in her heart, "Which of 
us is happy in this world?" 

The moment we reflect, we perceive how/ 
subtly the mere manner of Pendennis has de- 
ceived us. We find that we have been chat- 
ting over two of the saddest of Thackeray's 
creations and laughing over two of the crud- 
est. We have seen all manner of things go 
wrong, and only a few go right. We have 
been at elbows with injustice, falseness and 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 113 

heartbreak. And all the while we have been 
laughing. We sec now that it is the laughter 
of despair much more nearly than of mirth. 
We see why Trollope insists "that he is al- 
ways within his own bosom encountering mel- 
ancholy with buffoonery and meanness with 
satire." 

However, did I have to choose one episode 
which standing by itself should be the repre- 
sentative of Thackeray's first manner, I would 
choose the episode of the Fotheringay. To 
my mind it combines as does nothing else in 
that manner lightness with substance, grace 
with significance, naturalness with power. 
In every line of it there is that precision of 
stroke which does not come until success has 
bred confidence. Also, there is that intimacy 
between the maker and his material which 
shows that he is past the period of experiment. 
He knows both his powers and his limits and 
does not waste time trying to do things he 
cannot do. As to the contents of the episode, 
we catalogue among them, the finest old snob 
in fiction, the best Irish blackguard, one of 
the most ironic misanthropes, one of the most 
sufficing symbols of the placid egoist, and a 
perfectly delightful exposition of the engag- 
ing folly of youth. 



114 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

But along with the charm of the first man- 
ner we have in Pendennis its underlying 
y wretchedness, its false conception of life. 
Among the half dozen tragedies that are 
pieced together to make the dark foundations 
of this glittering fabric, two are of chief mo- 
ment; and both give opportunity to the 
enemies of Thackeray to accuse him of senti- 
mentalism. 

Of these, the greater is the story of old 
Bowes who taught the Fotheringay her art. 
The bitterness that lay at the bottom of Thack- 
eray's first manner found its crowning expres- 
sion in the relation of those two. And all his 
thinking about them is false. Bowes, the 
lame musician, the ruined and hopeless 
dreamer; Fotheringay, the serene and perfect 
egoist, heartless, mindless, soulless, pure self 
i with only beauty to make it evident; those two 
! and their relations to each other are not an 
1 expression of human life but of Thackeray's 
! warped conception of life. In Fotheringay 
/> he has merely changed the sex of his eternal 
egoist and ironically decorated it with an out- 
side of feminine loveliness while vulgarising 
' it through the lack of mind. It is a wonder 
that Mr. Whibley, in his zeal to find fault 
with Thackeray,, has not pointed out that Miss 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 115 

Fotheringay artistically is daughter and heir- 
ess to the Marquis of Steyne and that in her 
as in him Thackeray has exaggerated his 
image of egoism until it is almost melodra- 
matic. In the case of Fotheringay he is even 
worse than with Steyne, for he gave the 
Marquis some great qualities and did not try 
to make us believe that anybody loved him. 
But with her, though depriving her deliber- 
ately of every possible attraction except beauty 
— reiterating that she is simply a great, stupid, 
impressive animal — he rings the changes upon 
Bowes' hopeless love. Bowes knew that she 
was stupid, knew that she was an animal, knew 
there was nothing to her but her beauty, and / 
yet his infatuation instead of being held up as I 
a symptom of something wrong in himself, is 
used as a sort of wailing chorus, sounding ; 
melodiously at the back of things, like the j 
sound of the sea in a shell. The truth is poor 
old Bowes — if we are to take him as a man 
and not as a mere symbol — was a sentimental- 
ist. It was not that dull woman — that glori- 
fied cow — with which Bowes was in love, but 
a dream in his own mind which he sought to 
make the woman express. When we cut deep 
into his melancholy, we find that the heart of 
it is baffled love of himself. 



116 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

However these two are not really to be 
thought of as persons. They are but symbols 
— Fotheringay of that malign fate which we 
j are asked to believe rules the world, Bowes 
«^ ' of its shadow upon mankind — and in their re- 
lations to each other is that formula of human 
life which underlies the whole of the first man- 
ner. Really, Mr. Whibley should have no- 
ticed this. 

The other of the two tragedies that are all 
wrong is the story of George Warrington. 
Thackeray has endeared him to us not by what 
the man was in himself but by the inimitable 
way in which his author wrote of him. Again, 
it is the style that is deceiving us, sentimentalis- 
ing us. We are told that Warrington flung 
away his life, led a useless existence upon the 
outskirts of Bohemia, and if we demand why, 
we are asked gravely to believe the following: 
when very young he had been caught by a vul- 
gar woman — another Fotheringay apparently 
— and having come to his senses he lost desire 
for fame and position for if he gained them his 
wife would assert her claim to him. To get 
rid of her he condemned himself to be a do- 
nothing. In these few words the story is 
ridiculous. But in Thackeray it is very differ- 
ent. Through the magical skill of his style 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 117 

Thackeray imposes on us yet once more, gets 
possession of our hearts, and, first thing we 
know, we are weeping over Warrington as over 
a suffering hero. But when the tale is over 
and the spell of the telling has worn away, we 
can see that we have been fooled. Perhaps we 
lose our tempers and ask sarcastically why 
didn't Warrington force the situation — defy 
the woman, or make her over, or go to the 
colonies, or do something — instead of smoking 
out his life doing nothing. In such a mood we 
are tempted even to call his story bosh. 

But even now we are not done with the 
cruelties that underlie this apparently gay 
book. We have still to reckon with Blanche 
Amory. She and the Fotheringay are the two 
entirely heartless creatures who move like 
clouds across the page. Her cruelty to Foker 
is a sort of burlesque parallel to the cruelty of 
her rival to Bowes. As to artistic descent, 
Blanche's pedigree is not so plain. There is a 
certain kinship with Becky but it were best not 
to press the point. She is youthful egoism. 
It is an ugly theme, not often expressed, hardly 
worthy to be expressed. One is almost 
tempted to hope that no one will ever express 
it again. The picture is exaggerated — as of 
course we should expect at this period in 



118 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

Thackeray — and the lines of it are laid down 
with a contempt that is almost savage. We 
shudder and turn aside. Here is Becky minus 
her charm, minus her courage. Here is the 
real, last analysis of what Becky signifies. 
Let us drop the curtain. 

Over against these powerful images of evil 
stand two inadequate images of virtue. Pen's 
mother and Laura Bell. Alas! the constant 
limitation of the first manner. It cannot 
unite goodness and power. Laura is almost 
colourless. Mrs. Pendennis, for all her 
sweetness, her self-sacrifice, is without mind 
and exacts full return for her affection. Not 
to mince matters, she is emotionally a tyrant. 
She is just to Pen only so long as he obeys her. 
A hint of Rawdon's treatment by his aunt 
survives in the treatment of Pen by his mother. 
Even this devoted mother is, in a way, an 
egoist. Will Thackeray never have done 
with this cruel theme? 

To speak of Pendennis without saluting the 
Major, would of course, be incredible. But 
with so famous a personage it would hardly 
be good form to do more than lift one's hat 
differentially and pass on. He is the su- 
preme height of polite snobdom. 

There is much that suggests autobiography 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 119 

in Pendennis. A great deal of the scenery 
came directly out of Thackeray's own associa- 
tions. Pen's adventures in Devonshire, at 
college and in the Temple are much v^hat 
Thackeray's were. Naturally there is a 
temptation to identify Arthur Pendennis with 
William Thackeray and if we bear in mind 
Thackeray's tendency to exaggerate the weak- i 
ness of his characters, the identification may/ 
be allowed. In his first manner he was never' 
quite just to anybody, not excepting himself. 
It seems plain that Thackeray was not sat- 
isfied with his own attempt to write the novel 
of youth. He makes an end of his first man- 
ner with the feeling, apparently, that his work 
was insipid. All of us remember his famous j 
saying, relative to Pen, that no Englishman | 
since Fielding dared draw a man. This has ^ 
been construed to signify that Thackeray han- 
kered after the freedom of the French. But 
those who take that view have forgotten an 
important bit of evidence. Thackeray is one 
of the few novelists whose conception of youth 
involves chastity. He takes pains to tell us 
that though Pen had many vices there was[ 
one from which he was free. His love for! 
his mother kept him apart from all women 
whom he knew were impure. Surely, it was 



120 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

not the French freedom to be scandalous for 
which Thackeray longed, but just what it was 
he longed for we cannot say. Of one thing, 
however, we may be sure. Had Thackeray 
been a happy man, had he not been borne 
down by his lack of faith in life, he would 
have been just the one to write the epic of 
youth, to take youth through its struggles for 
the sake not of the pathos but the charm. He 
knew through his own experience what my- 
riad pitfalls surround the tender, the ardent, 
the believing heart of youth. He knew what 
harm has been done, is still done, by the im- 

"^ modest veilings spun by prudery. He longed 
to tear apart the veils, to throw the sunlight 
into every darkened corner, to show to youth 
itself the glory of its own being and the pity, 
the inexpressible pity, of abusing it. But he 
had not the heart to try. Something checked 
him, something held him back. He revenged 
himself by saying that people would not lis- 
ten. But that was not all. The deeper ex- 

r planation was his own irresolution, his own 
lack of faith, his own doubt whether he was 
not dreaming of fairyland. After all, most 
youth, like most maturity, showed unpleasing 
aspects to his biassed eye. He could not write 
what he did not believe. Thus one of the 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 121 

great opportunities in literature passed away. 
The grandeur, the heroism of youth, Shakes- 
peare gave us; the comedy, the pathos of it,l 
Thackeray gave us; the depth and the won-i 
der are still to be told. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TURNING POINT 

THE famous Athenaeum Club comes 
nearer to taking the place of the 
French Academy than anything else 
in England. A recognition of Thackeray's 
success was his election to the Athenaeum, Feb- 
ruary 25, 1 85 1. It has often been stated that 
he had been previously blackballed but Sir 
Leslie Stephen declares that the report is un- 
founded. He adds, however, that an attempt 
to elect Thackeray, in 1850, was brought to 
nought by the opposition of a single member. 
The move to elect him had been supported by 
Macaulay, Croker, Dean Milman and Lord 
Mahon. 

Thackeray's fortunes were now mending. 
He had hit fame and was becoming prosper- 
ous. Nevertheless he could not lay aside his 
solicitude over his children, nor cease from 
his anxiety to make more money. For this 
reason, by way of pot boiling, he tried his 

hand at lectures. His six lectures on the 

122 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 123 

English Humourists were delivered at Willis' 
Rooms between May 22 and July 3, 1851. 

A distinguished company attended these 
lectures which had the appreciation they de- 
served, though, to Thackeray's over-sen- 
sitive mind, the first lecture, on Swift, 
seemed a failure. He read from his 
manuscript making no attempt at oratory 
but producing as all witnesses agree a 
pleasing effect. The only serious charge 
which his enemies — Mr. Whibley and others 
— have been able to advance against the 
Humourists is that the portrait of Swift is 
overdone. This must be allowed. Thack- 
eray was so struck by the broad traits of evil 
which form the main lines of Swift that he 
allowed himself to put into the Dean's portrait 
much the same exaggeration which he had put 
into the portrait of Steyne. At the same time 
we should remember that in 1851 the attempt 
to prove Swift less black than he had been 
painted had not begun. Thackeray was but 
one of many who had fallen into the error of 
imagining Swift the devil. 

The lectures on the Humourists are the be- 
ginning of Thackeray's second manner. The 
gaiety of Vanity Fair and Pendennis, that 
peculiar brilliancy as of the first hours of the 



124 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

day, which belongs to the new-found joy of 
the working, has run its course. The point 
in the career of any artist at which that first 
wave subsides is of immense significance 
psychologically, and when the mind of the 
artist is not at peace the subsidence of that 
wave is a moment of crisis. Right there, very 
likely, he will be weighed in the balance. Ac- 
cording as the heart of him is trivial or heroic 
it will follow either that the ebb tide ends 
the story, or else that a returning wave more 
deep and majestic than its glittering predeces- 
sor lifts him higher than before. In the life 
of Thackeray that point of crisis was the year 
1851. 

Why the change in Thackeray which dates 
from that year should have begun precisely 
when it did is hard to say. The evidence upon 
this part of his inward drama is scant. We 
may take it on faith however, that the noble 
heart of the man — and we must remember that 
his weaknesses proceeded always from mis- 
directed good, never from anything innately 
bad — had long been slowly making head 
against his sensibilities. The psychologists 
say that resolutions are formed in us slowly 
while we are not aware ; that the power to make 
a decision or perform an act is accumulated 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 125 

gradually, like the quiet banking up of a 
stream behind a dam ; but that only when the 
dam suddenly gives way and the stream rushes 
through do we see what has been coming for- 
ward all that long while in our minds. As 
I say, either the details of this part of Thack- 
eray's drama are lost or his family have not 
made them public, so that there is a gap in 
our knowledge of his evolution which must be 
bridged by conjecture. And as conjecture is 
unsatisfying I will not be the one who attempts 
to make the bridge, except by the way of a 
single suggestion. 

The writing of the Humourists compelled 
Thackeray to do justice to several lives in 
which natures as sensitive as his own bore ad- 
versity without flinching. To portray faith- 
fully such a character and such a career as that 
of Addison, or of Goldsmith, Thackeray had 
to enter into their minds and look on life with 
their eyes, make their feelings for the time his 
own. He succeeded in doing so and I cannot 
but think that the effect on him was far-reach- 
ing. Had he not been ripe to be effected, had 
not the water behind the dam already risen 
high, this last addition to it might not have 
cleft the dam asunder. We must conclude 
that details which have been lost would have 



126 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

made plain that Thackeray obeyed the same 
psychological law as the rest of us and had 
been preparing for his transformation with 
very little knowledge, if any, of whither he 
was tending. When we look forward a few 
months and note the part which in the scheme 
of Henry Esmond he assigned to Addison, 
surely we have ground for thinking that in 
1 85 1, when Thackeray was at work upon the 
Humourists and later upon Esmond, he went 
apart many times into spirit land and had there 
long walks and talks with Addison and re- 
turned to earth bent on imitating not only in 
his art but in his life, that gallant gentle- 
man. 

However, be this as it may, Thackeray 
turned at once from the lectures to The His- 
tory of Henry Esmond, Esquire, a Colonel in 
the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne, writ- 
ten by Himself. 

Not content with his general knowledge of 
the age of Anne he read much in the library 
of the British Museum and the Athenaeum 
Library, and made every efifort to be accurate 
in detail. The manuscript now at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, shows, in contrast with 
his earlier manuscripts, very few corrections. 
He had acquired the practised hand which 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 127 

hits its mark at the first stroke. The date of 
the completion of Esmond seems to be fixed 
by a letter of Fitzgerald, dated 2 June, 1852, 
in which he says it "was finished last Satur- 
day." Esmond was not published in numbers 
and Thackeray kept the entire manuscript be- 
fore him until it was sent to the publisher. 
This, doubtless accounts for its comparative 
brevity — it is only about half the length of 
The Newcomes — and for the closer weave 
of it. There was no obligation to fill space 
at all cost as there was with those other novels 
which came out in monthly numbers while 
Thackeray was still at work on them. Es- 
mond had a good sale from the first and re- 
turned Thackeray on the first edition £1200. 
In writing this famous novel, so often called 
his masterpiece, Thackeray fell back upon 
his earlier tour-de-force, upon Barry Lyn- 
don, in which he had proved to himself that 
he could write a fictitious autobiography and 
make it express in every line not his own 
personality but that of the supposed author. 
The subtlety of his mind delighted in such 
an undertaking, in its demand for deftness, 
for tact. Not a statement, not an opinion, 
not a recollection of Barry Lyndon's, but was 
coloured by the man's feeling and compelled 



128 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

to reveal his nature. In Esmond, Thackeray 
repeated at greater length but with a less diffi- 
cult subject the same extraordinary feat. 
Having gathered together various types and 
set them down in the history of the time of 
Anne he gives us not his own version of what 
they were, and how they did, but the version 
of one of the actors in the piece. From be- 
ginning to the end, it is never Thackeray who 
speaks, always the melancholy Colonel Es- 
mond. 

The world which Colonel Esmond knew, 
which that eminent literary person has de- 
scribed so remarkably, was on the outside the 
world of Queen Anne. Its events were the 
events of that reign. But let us not be de- 
ceived. Colonel Esmond lived in a Reign of 
Anne which was especially constructed for 
his use and whose people, with very few ex- 
ceptions, are people not of the eighteenth 
century but of the first manner of William 
Thackeray. The book does not become in- 
telligible biographically until we grasp this 
fact. In Henry Esmond we have the peo- 
ple of Thackeray's first manner, presented to 
us through a new medium, and made to enact 
for our amusement an historical drama. The 
novel must not be classed with those which 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 129 

went before, for in Esmond there is a new 
temper which sets it aside and because of 
which we say it is in Thackeray's second man- 
ner. However, though Thackeray's temper 
has changed, his material is still in the main 
what it has been. For the originals of the 
people in Henry Esmond, for the source of 
its conception of life, we should look not to 
history but to that peculiar assemblage of 
ideas in which Thackeray moved and had his 
being between thirty and forty. 

Nothing is more fundamental in that world 
of the first manner than the prevalence of an 
ironic fate. In the world of Colonel Esmond 
this is duplicated. All the circumstances of 
his life move in tune with the old refrain — 
which of us is happy in this world. We see 
him first in his youth, when he is supposed, 
and supposes himself, to be the natural son of 
the former Lord Castlewood and therefore a 
mere dependent on the present lord. For that 
reason in his relations with the lovely Lady 
Castlewood, and her charming children, 
Frank and Beatrix, in spite of all their kind- 
ness, he can never quite forget how fate has 
dealt with him. And then by a sudden stroke 
of fortune the situation is reversed and the 
irony made ten fold more oppressive. Lord 



130 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

Castlewood, dissolute and a gambler, whose 
wife we discover is very jealous, falls into reck- 
less habits and the result is his duel with Lord 
Mohun. On his death bed he tells Henry 
the truth, that he is true born and the rightful 
Lord. But ironic fate has Henry in its grasp. 
He has accepted so many favours of this Lord 
and his family, his own sensibilities are so 
potent, that he feels he cannot assert himself. 
Therefore he stands by and lets young Frank 
succeed. But again his position becomes iron- 
ical. ^^Lady Castlewood, conscious that she has 
not loved her husband, seeks to clear herself 
to her conscience by a violent parade of grief, 
and incidentally by refusing to have more to 
do with Henry, nominally because he did not 
prevent the duel, really because she is, and 
now admits to herself that she long has been, 
in love with him. So fate acts throughout 
the book. Always in all Henry's version of 
human affairs, there is the malign influence, 
coming we know not whence, but having the 
effect of thwarting our heart's desire. As a 
soldier, as a politician, as a lover, as a man, he 
is always crossed by destiny. In the wars, he 
moves with awed hatred in the shadow of the 
dreadful Marlborough, that heartless imper- 
sonation of fate; he sees his dear General 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 131 

Webb cheated of the credit for his brilliant 
victory of Wynandael; and at last he sees 
Marlborough fall for no apparent reason ex- 
cept that it is the fate of everybody to go down. 
In politics there comes a time when he mixes 
boldly into the great game of foisting the Pre- 
tender on the nation at the death of Anne but 
again the malign influence that rules the 
affairs of men interferes; the Pretender slips 
away from London into the country after the 
bright eyes of Beatrix and so the one moment 
when he might have won the game is lost. 
As a lover, having been reconciled to the 
Castlewood family he dangles after Beatrix 
for near ten years, while she, according to his 
account of her, plays the part of a heartless 
coquette and is — by implication — impervious 
to all the noble qualities in man. And Bea- 
trix also is cheated by fate, for the great Duke 
she was to marry is killed, shortly before their 
wedding day, by that same Mohun who killed 
her father. Finally, Lady Castlewood, who 
all this while has really been in love with 
Henry and jealous of Beatrix, becomes his 
wife. That is the last arch irony of all as 
Thackeray has made plain in The Virginians 
where we have a glimpse of Esmond, long 
after, resigned but not happy, a distinguished, 



132 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 



melancholy gentleman, who is still at heart in 
love with Beatrix. 

The origin of the chief people in this 
troubled assemblage is quite plain. Perhaps 
the most obvious is Marlborough. He is but 
the climax of Thackeray's procession of colos- 
sal egoists. He is Steyne translated into an 
Olympian. His shadow makes a darkness 
upon the world over which he rises like some 
beautiful evil spirit "having this of the god- 
like in him that he could see a hero perish 
or a sparrow fall, with the same amount of 
sympathy for either." 

Mr. Whibley, always lying in wait to cast a 
stone, makes a great fuss about the portrait 
of Marlborough. He implies that in paint- 
ing it Thackeray illustrated the unlimited 
capacity of sentimentalism to believe in bad- 
ness. He points out that the Marlborough of 
Henry Esmond is not only false historically 
but absurd as an image of a man, that it is 
mere melodrama. Having cited the scene 
at the banquet where Webb hands the Gazette 
to his chief on the point of his sword, he ex- 
ults in the assertion that even Thackeray did 
not dare, once he had brought the great Duke 
upon the scene, to make him anything but mas- 
ter of the situation. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 133 

What a lot of pother about nothing ! If Mr. 
Whibley would only bear in mind what 
Thackeray was doing in Esmond all his right- 
eous indignation would disappear. All he has 
said is true but it hits not Thackeray but Col- 
onel Esmond. As well be angry with Thack- 
eray because things are seen out of focus by 
Barry Lyndon as because the same happens 
with Henry Esmond. In his way, the latter 
is as far from a normal character as the for- 
mer and he reveals his bias in the huge melo- 
dramatic monster which he seeks to impose on 
us as John Churchill. The way in which his 
fiction collapses into nothing the moment we 
face the actual giant — though he makes only 
two remarks and these of the simplest — is one 
of Thackeray's fine achievements. 

The real hint which we should get from the 
unreal image of Marlborough is that Esmond 
is not an accurate reporter; that he does not 
see people as they are. How anyone should 
fail to observe this fact — especially after Barry 
Lyndon — is strange. Esmond's view of life is 
so definite and so perfectly sustained that we 
must allow for it at every turn. Nevertheless 
Thackeray seems to have had a fear that people 
who read with but one eye might miss the 
point and therefore, twice, by means of foot- 



134 THE SPIRITUAL DRAJ^IA IN 

notes, he thrust it in our faces that the whole 
of Esmond's performance is what actors call 
"in character." One of the two notes explains 
that a certain passage was inserted into the 
memoirs in Esmond's old age when if not a 
better he was at least a wiser man than in those 
earlier days when the memoirs were written 
and the great Duke was so grossly libelled. 
Colonel Esmond was not of large enough na- 
ture to make a generous apology for his libel, 
but even he, upon mature reflection, felt that 
some sort of retraction was due. Accordingly, 
"on a fly leaf inserted into the ms. book and 
dated 1744" (so says the note) he made this 
grudging and ungenerous admission of his own 
lack of candour: "Should any child of mine 
take the pains to read these his ancestor's 
memoirs, I would not have him judge the great 
Duke by what a contemporary has written of 
him. No man hath been so immensely lauded 
and described as this great statesman and war- 
rior: as, indeed, no man ever deserved better 
the very greatest praise and the strongest cen- 
sure. If the present writer joins with the lat- 
ter faction, very likely a private pique of his 
own may be the cause of his ill-feeling." 

One would think that this were enough to 
put even a careless reader on the right track 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 135 

but Thackeray, to make assurance more than 
sure, added that other note, the little essay in- 
serted in the memoirs by Esmond's grandchild, 
beginning, "Our grandfather's hatred of the 
Duke of Marlborough appears all through his 
account of these campaigns," and closing with 
"He was as constant in his dislikes as in his 
attachments ; and exceedingly partial to Webb 
whose side he took against the more celebrated 
general. We have General Webb's portrait 
now at Castlewood, Va." 

Remembering, then, that we have in the 
portrait of Marlborough not an authentic like- 
ness of the great Duke but only a record of 
his impression on Henry Esmond — the impres- 
sion he made on a sensitive and unforgiving na- 
ture — we turn to another portrait drawn by the 
same hand and more famous even than that 
of Marlborough. We may note in passing that 
previous to Henry Esmond Thackeray had 
not put a masculine and feminine egoist of the 
first magnitude into the same book. Though 
Vanity Fair had Steyne it had no correspond- 
ing woman. Though Pendennis had the 
Fotheringay she was without a counterpart 
among the men. But Esmond has them both. 
The same idea that is at the bottom of the 
Fotheringay — the idea of utterly merciless 



186 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

beauty — is dignified with birth, wit, courage, 
and given the name of Beatrix Esmond. In 
her and Henry, — as the latter believes, at least, 
— is such a relation as existed in Pendennis be- 
tween the Fotheringay and Bowes. I insist 
that this is Colonel Esmond's version of the 
facts and not necessarily Thackeray's. To 
(Colonel Esmond's eye, Beatrix was a heartless 
flirt, whom he worshipped for ten years, to 
whom he offered sacrifices daily, but who was 
dead to love. At last, in sheer disgust at her 
heartlessness he turned haughtily away from 
her and married — O irony of ironies! — her 
mother. And the melancholy Colonel, who 
does not appear to have known that humour 
existed, could write this down and leave it be- 
hind in his memoirs! 

We must never forget in discussing this novel 
that Henry Esmond is modelled on Barry Lyn- 
don. The fact that Colonel Esmond is a gen- 
tleman, and that his ideas have much in com- 
mon with our own should not hoodwink us. 
In the earlier autobiography we never forget 
that Barry is talking because at every turn we 
perceive his separation from ourselves. But 
in the case of Colonel Esmond, all his ordinary 
ideas are the ordinary ideas of the people we 
know, and by these ideas we are thrown off our 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 137 

guard so that we forget at times that on ex- 
traordinary matters he is sharply, invariably 
himself. Therefore, we must bear in mind 
that his version of Beatrix is a prejudiced one. 
An exacting and jealous man — for such he 
was — has painted pretty black the beautiful 
woman whose heart he could never touch. 
But the question arises, "Is Beatrix a coherent 
character?" Mr. Whibley seizes upon her as 
one more count in his charge against Thack- 
eray. He declares, in substance, that she is not 
a person, only the most beautiful of lay figures. 
In reply, I would ask the reader to experiment. 
[Suppose we break off in reading Esmond 
at the death of the Duke of Hamilton. Is not 
the Beatrix we know, then, a person? I be- 
lieve she is — a beautiful, brilliant, hard, but 
not necessarily an evil, being. Suppose now, 
we put aside, if we can, the thought of that 
Beatrix and turn to that other of the last 
episode of the book, the Beatrix who made 
such a dead set at the Pretender, who spoiled 
his chance for succession to the crown, then fol- 
lowed the worthless young fool to Paris and 
ended her career in a way Esmond scorns to 
tell. Is the latter a real person or a piece of 
melodrama? If she is real, does she unite 
with the first? 



138 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

For my own part I feel that we have here 
two creations, that the first and the second 
cannot be wrought together as one person, 
and that the later Beatrix is melodramatic. In 
the first Beatrix Thackeray started out to give 
us a portrait of a genuine, splendid human flirt. 
Afterwards in another, and perhaps a truer 
book, he did what he here set out to do and 
the result was Ethel Newcome. But in 
Esmond he allowed himself to be side tracked 
and fell back upon melodrama to the tune of 
Bowes and the Fotheringay. Even when we 
allow for the exaggerations due to Esmond's 
disposition, the later Beatrix is an odious and 
unreal creature who is a libel on the first. 

The Beatrix who talked to Esmond in the 
fifth chapter of the third book — that day he 
gave her the diamonds and Duke Hamilton re- 
sented it and Lady Castlewood revealed the 
secret of his birth — is a real person not with- 
out a heart. Had Esmond been worthy of her 
— but here are her own words : "in eight years 
no man hath ever touched my heart. Yes — 
you did once for a little, Harry, when you 
came back from Lille and engaging with that 
murderer Mohun, and saving Frank's life. I 
thought I could like you ; and mamma begged 
me hard, on her knees, and I did — for a day. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 139 

But the old chill came over me, Henry, and 
the old fear of you and your melancholy, and 
I was glad when you went away, and engaged 
with my Lord Ashburnham that I might hear 
no more of you, that's the truth. You are 
too good for me, somehow. I could not make 
you happy, and I should break my heart in 
trying and not being able to love you." 

Was Henry Esmond to blame because no 
man ever touched the heart of Beatrix? 
She cared for him at the one time when he 
flared up, in her imagination, into buoyant 
manfulness. But he relapsed almost im- 
mediately into gloom and sentimentality and 
poses. She knew he could never forget him- 
self and hence her fear of him, her sense of 
oppression when she was with him. Surely, 
even through the veil of Colonel Esmond's 
sentimentalised version, the facts are plain. 
The first Beatrix was a bold and clear-sighted 
woman who must have for her love a man in 
tune with herself. At the time when we saw 
her last she had not found him. 

The second Beatrix we may concede to Mr. 
Whibley. In comparison with the first she 
is almost vulgar. Her career is the only thing 
in Henry Esmond that may be justly charged 
against Thackeray and not put down to the 



140 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

biassed view of Esmond himself. The first 
Beatrix, had she been the heroine of that fine 
scene in which her mother, her brother and 
the jealous Colonel reveal to the second Bea- 
trix that they have no faith in her, would have 
turned on them like an angry queen, and made 
them appear contemptible. The second Bea- 
trix has so little majesty that we could hardly 
be more surprised if she let slip an oath. 
This part of the incident might, to be sure, 
be accounted for on the ground of the Col- 
onel's misrepresentation but such explanation 
will hardly clear her for luring the Pretender 
away at the critical moment and so spoiling 
the intrigue. We are certainly intended to 
accept as truth the Colonel's version of her 
disgraceful later life — all of which in connec- 
tion with the first Beatrix is unbelievable. 

Her mother is the true compliment of 
Henry. Like him she is a sentimentalist, 
luxuriating in her own emotions, with a 
fondness for being unhappy. The base of 
her, perhaps is Mrs. Pendennis. But 
though Mrs. Pendennis was weak, tyran- 
nical and suspicious we must not accuse 
her of too close kinship with the highly 
sentimental and intensely jealous Lady Castle- 
wood. Let the latter as far as possible stand 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 141 

alone, a monument of emotional egoism with a 
smoothly pious front which imposed entirely 
on itself. 

There remains to be accounted for the char- 
acter of Henry Esmond, and in this character 
lies the real significance of the book both to the 
general reader and to the student of Thack- 
eray's development. We find among the 
earlier figures no one that will serve as orig- 
inal for Esmond and yet the most superficial 
observer must feel that Esmond's nature is in 
harmony with the underlying ideas of the first 
manner. There we have him. Esmond is 
simply the point of view which lay back of 
the first manner made into a man. 

It is plain that in 1851 Thackeray waked to 
a realisation of what he had been doing in the 
half dozen years previous. He saw that he 
had allowed himself to be sentimentalised, to 
make a luxury of unhappiness; that he had 
permitted himself to set a premium on melan- 
choly and to undervalue the duty of cheerful- 
ness; that he had misrepresented the world to 
his own mind and had paid the price of failing 
to understand the world. This subject of his 
mistaken point of view, and of its inevitable 
results, must have deeply impressed him for 
he set to work to embody it in a novel. He 



142 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

created a character which was the perfect ex- 
pression of that point of view, in whom there 
were no counteracting elements — such, for- 
tunately, as Thackeray had in himself. That 
is to say, he made, in mathematical phrase, a 
reductio ad absurdum. Therefore the charac- 
ter was melancholy, sensitive, brooding, egois- 
tic, sentimental, and all these to an extreme. 
About this character he placed such a world — 
except for a single great exception — as he had 
himself seen through the medium of his dis- 
torted sensibilities. For the text of the novel 
he set down with utmost skill an account of 
that world as it appeared to the character. 
Such is the plain origin of The History of 
Henry Esmond. 

Those who are unaccustomed to observe 
closely the habits of mind of an artist, who 
have not noticed how his works grow, the later 
from the earlier, like plants from cuttings, 
might set this aside as mere accident were 
it not for two considerations. In Esmond 
Thackeray does two things which he never 
did before. In the first place he makes a 
sentimentalist betray his nature. By numer- 
ous little comments, chiefly from Beatrix, 
which the Colonel is sufficiently candid to pre- 
serve, we see that she understood, and through 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 143 

her we come to understand, that the core of 
Esmond is preoccupation with himself. That 
is what gets in his way throughout life. He 
is always nursing his emotions, always lux- 
uriating in his trouble. As an inevitable con- 
sequence he never can be happy. His melan- 
choly is no mere accident. By means of it we 
see judgment passed upon that type of char- 
acter which is preoccupied with self, that can 
never forget itself in sympathy with others. 
No wonder St. John used to call him "the 
Knight of the Rueful Countenance." No 
wonder he frightened Beatrix. And all this 
the reader is made to see very subtly through 
the words of the man himself. It is vain to 
call such art accidental. 

The other thing which Thackeray had not 
attempted in any previous novel was the same 
undertaking which had been forced on him by 
writing the Humourists. Again we wonder 
whether those lectures do not mark the very 
crisis of his life. In no work of the first man- 
ner is there any strong good man who, though 
unfortunate, is not cast down, and who was 
free from sentimentality. In the Humourists, 
for the first time, Thackeray did justice to 
such characters. Having gone on into The 
History of Henry Esmond he contrived to 



144 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

take with him the beautiful figure of Addison, 
and if this book contained no other evidence 
of a change of mood in the artist the presence 
of this one figure would be enough. Even 
through the veil of Esmond's false way of 
seeing things, that undaunted countenance 
shines forth. In his quiet way, in a corner of 
the picture, this man is as essential to the 
whole effect as even the warrior Duke who 
overshadows it all. He is a prophecy of what 
Thackeray will come to in that noble third 
manner of his, which, at the time Esmond 
was written, still slept in the future. What 
could be finer than Addison's talk in his gar- 
ret after the entrance and exit of a brilliant 
official. 

"Does not the chamber look quite dark?" 
says Addison surveying it, "after the glo- 
rious appearance and disappearance of that 
gracious messenger? Why, he illuminated 
the whole room. Your scarlet Mr. Esmond 
will bear any light; but this threadbare old 
coat of mine how very worn it looked under 
the glare of that splendour! I wonder 
whether he will do anything for me," he con- 
tinued. "When I came out of Oxford into 
the world, my patrons promised me great 
things; and you see where their promises have 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 145 

landed mc, in a lodging up two pairs of stairs, 
with a six penny dinner from the cook's shop. 
Well, I suppose this promise will go after the 
others and fortune will jilt me as the jade has 
been doing any time these seven years. . . . 
Friend Dick hath made a figure in the world 
and passed me in the race long ago. What 
matters a little name or a little fortune? 
There is no fortune that a philosopher cannot 
endure . . . 'tis not poverty that's the hard- 
est to bear or the least happy lot in life," says 
Mr. Addison, shaking the ash out of his pipe. 
"See my pipe is smoked out. Shall we have 
another bottle? I have still a couple in the 
cupboard and of the right sort. No more? — 
let us go abroad and take a turn on the Mall, 
or look in at the theatre and see Dick's 
comedy. 'Tis not a masterpiece of wit; but 
Dick is a good fellow though he doth not set 
the Thames on fire." 

From this serene man who, no less than 
Esmond, was made unhappy by a woman, and 
who by his manful constancy brought her 
round at last and married her, from him we 
turn our eyes to the Knight of the Rueful 
Countenance. Could any contrast be greater? 
In those two is one more commentary on the 
line "to him that hath shall be given and from 



146 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

him that hath not shall be taken away even 
that which he hath." To the valiant Addison 
success finally takes its course. From the 
doubtful Esmond all things desirable flee 
away. In all of Addison's doings there is the 
quiet rightness which comes of not exaggera- 
ting their importance. To every act of Es- 
mond much brooding on its significance has 
given a touch of unreality. With Addison 
things come right, at last, because he is enabled 
through his faith that in the long run noth- 
ing can go wrong, to be patient, to endure 
misfortune, and to seize his opportunity when 
it arises. Esmond, on the other hand, can 
never get his way because he never can be- 
lieve that he will get it — his inclination to feel 
sorry for himself is always drawing him off to 
one side for some indulgence in self-pity — 
and consequently he can make no convincing 
impression on others. Above all, in every 
thought of Addison's, there is the belief that 
behind all things is God's love and therefore, 
dark though the moments may appear, let not 
your hearts be troubled. For Esmond, at the 
back of human life, there is nothing but the 
caprice of fortune and therefore nothing cer- 
tain in this world. We can imagine Addison, 
firm in his conviction that life is not an acci- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 147 

dent, that all of us at last come to our own, ac- 
cepting cheerfully, in the days when his love 
affair looked the darkest, those spirited mod- 
ern lines 

"You'll love me yet and I can tarry 

Your love's protracted growing 
June raised that bunch of flowers you carry 
From seeds of April's sowing." 

Who could imagine Henry Esmond ap- 
proaching Beatrix in such a mood? Nay, 
more, we can imagine Addison looking quietly 
into himself, inquiring whether something 
were not wrong there and whether the woman 
so far, had not been wise in holding off. 
Henry Esmond could no more have made such 
inquiry than he could have changed the colour 
of his eyes. It is Beatrix — always Beatrix — 
only Beatrix — who is to blame because their 
affair goes wrong. 

In Esmond Thackeray hit a subtle perfec- 
tion of art not at all like the simpler "good 
story" art of Vanity Fair^ not so likely to be 
popular, but one that is far more character- 
istic. The book can hardly be said to have 
a plot but it certainly has a unity. This unity 
suggests painting rather than literature. I be- 
lieve most people, if they examine their recol- 



148 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

lection of Esmond^ will find that the impres- 
sion is not so much of a series of events as of 
a group of figures. The more we study this 
group the more we become aware of the signif- 
icance of Addison. The effect of the whole, 
its richness, its Tightness, its mellowness, de- 
pends at last upon that beautiful calm figure 
in the background. With matchless tact, just 
as the curtain falls, our eyes are brought 
around to this figure and we get our last view 
of Addison, now great and powerful, in a be- 
nign attitude of protection. After the utter 
failure of Esmond, it was "by the kindness of 
Mr. Addison," that "all danger of prosecu- 
tion . . . was removed." 

The History of Henry Esmond is like a 
painting I have seen somewhere of a fall of 
rain beyond which is a landscape while far in 
the distance upon some hills the sun shines. 
At first glance all objects in the picture appear 
veiled and misty with the rain. But on closer 
study we become able to allow for the rain as 
for a transparent mask and through it we make 
things out in their right forms and range them 
toward the sunshine at the back. So with this 
wonderful novel. The gloomy mood of the 
narrator, his false conception of life, fills the 
foreground of the picture as if there were fall- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 149 

ing before our eyes all the tears of the world. 
At first sight the whole scene appears to chord 
with his own dark figure. It seems to be a 
terrible procession of conquerors, beneath a 
darkened heaven, moving around captured 
cities, with trumpets and armour and banners, 
doing merciless pagan honour to Mars and 
Venus. However, as the eye grows accus- 
tomed to the spectacle, we see that of this great 
assemblage of figures not all are in the region 
of falling tears. Rank after rank, they range 
into the background, growing brighter as they 
recede, and then, upon a sudden, we perceive 
that at the back of all is a world of calmness 
and sunshine. There, the remote key to the 
whole composition, stands the beautiful figure 
of Addison. 

The significance of The History of Henry 
Esmond is thus revealed. As a piece of think- 
ing it is the reductio ad absurdum of the mood 
of sentimentalism. As an incident in Thack- 
eray's biography it marks the point at which 
he grappled with that evil in himself. In 
writing this novel he forced his sentimentalism 
to come forth, to stand apart and take on form 
so that he might see it plain and know the face 
of his enemy. Then he cast it from him for- 
ever. 



CHAPTER Vn 

READJUSTMENT 

THACKERAY had prepared his lec- 
tures on the Humourists with an tyQ-ff 
to a tour in America. He sailed frona^ 
Boston together with James Russell Lowell 
and Arthur Hugh Clough, October 30, 1852. 
Innumerable anecdotes are told of his Amer- 
ican sojourn. Considering the purpose of the 
trip, however, the main point is that he went 
home, in the spring of 1853, with profits that 
figured up to £2500. 

He remained a time in England, then went 
with his children to Switzerland. The sug- 
gestion of a novel which should contain cer- 
tain people of his childhood had been in his 
mind for some time and now, thinking upon 
what he should do next, this idea began to take 
shape. The Newcomes is one of those great 
works which came into being in the mind of 
the author almost at a blow. Thackeray's own 
account of the matter is in the epilogue of the 
novel and is dated "Paris 20th June, 1855." 

150 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 151 

"Two years ago walking with my children 
in some pleasant fields near to Berne in Swit- 
zerland, I strayed from them into a little 
wood; and, coming out of it presently told 
them how the story had been revealed to me 
somehow which for three and twenty months 
the reader has been pleased to follow." 

The lover of Thackeray may be pardoned 
for lingering with fond reverence upon the 
thought of that day. Mrs. Ritchie's account 
of it must be quoted: "Some moments have 
their special characteristics, and I can still re- 
member that day, and the look of the fields in 
which we were walking, and the silence of the 
hour, and the faint, sultry, summer mountains, 
with the open wood at the foot of the sloping 
stubble. My father had been silent and pre- 
occupied when we first started, and was walk- 
ing thoughtfully apart. We waited till he 
came back to us, saying he now saw his way 
quite clearly, and he was cheerful and in good 
spirits as we returned to the inn." Plainly 
from Mrs. Ritchie's further account the novel 
was already begun. She continues, "I have a 
notebook of his for 1853 in which there are 
some memoranda of that time. We were 
travelling in Switzerland and Germany. We 
had come to Baden first of all where he records 



152 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

various excursions and drives, and notes the 
books which he is reading, as well as the people 
he meets : — 

"7th July 1853 — Began preface of The 
Newcomes." 

The fact that The Newcomes was begun at 
Baden gives a special interest to that group 
of masterly chapters, XXVII— XXXIV, 
which are to this novel what the Brussels 
episode is to Vanity Fair. In those chapters 
occurs the famous "Congress of Baden," that 
piece of high diplomacy in which Lady Kew 
so nearly settles things for all branches of 
the Newcome family — so nearly, but not 
quite. 

It was from Baden, on his forty-second 
birthday, that Thackeray wrote to his 
mother: 

"Baden, i8th July, 1853. ... I have had 
a hard week's work and am in No. 2 by this 
time, hoping to finish said number before the 
month is over: but I can't see but it is a repe- 
tition of past performances and think that 
vein is pretty nigh worked out in me. Never 
mind . . . this is not written for glory but 
for quite as good an object, namely money 
which will profit the children more than 
reputation when there's an end of me and 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 153 

money and reputation are alike pretty indif- 
ferent. . . . Honest old Miss Claphams are 
here, and recall the days of my youth to me. 
I go back to those well-remembered regions 
to get materials for the commencement of the 
new story. One of Dickens' immense supe- 
riorities over me is the great fecundity of his 
imagination. . . ." 

Commenting on this letter Mrs. Ritchie re- 
marks, "My father was always diffident about 
his work, especially at the starting of it." 
His diffidence made him trouble enough but 
there is another matter touched upon in that 
letter of his forty-second birthday which he, 
doubtless, did not appreciate. Though he 
talks of Dickens' "immense superiority" be- 
wailing his own lack of "fecundity," he 
should have been thankful on that ground. 
It is because he was thrown back several 
times upon the same material that he suc- 
ceeded, at last, in working out of it all the 
dross. 

In the autumn of 1853, Thackeray was at 
Paris where the fifth number of The New- 
comes was finished. Toward the end of 
November he started with his family for 
Italy, and on the 3rd of December they were 
in Rome. He worked steadily, Mrs. Ritchie 



154 THE SPIRITUAL DRAIVIA IN 

often acting as his amanuensis. *'0n one oc- 
casion," she tells us, "he was at work in some 
room in which he slept, high up in an hotel; 
the windows looked upon a wide and pleas- 
ant prospect, but I cannot put a name to my 
remembrance: and then he walked up and 
down, he paused, and then he paced the room 
again, stopping at last at the foot of the bed, 
where he stood rolling his hands over the 
brass ball at the foot of the bedstead. He 
was at that moment dictating the scene in 
which poor Jack Belsize pours out his story 
to Clive and J. J. at Baden. 'Yes,' my 
father said with a sort of laugh, looking down 
at his own hand (he was very much excited at 
the moment) 'that is just the sort of thing a 
man might do at such a time,' It was in this 
room, in this hotel in past land, that he chris- 
tened his heroine, still walking up and down 
the room, and making up his mind what her 
name should be." 

Following up the wander on which this 
great book was written, we catch a glimpse of 
Thackeray at Rome walking on the Prado 
*'with . . . Mr. Pollen, and three or four 
monks and priests in their robes." Mrs. 
Ritchie remembers "writing for him on a 
marble table in a great room with many win- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 155 

dows, and with walls hung with pictures and 
ornamented with swinging lamps and clas- 
sic columns, where pigeons perched on the 
deep window sills, voices called and pif- 
ferari droned from the street far below and 
charming people came to call and to inter- 
rupt us — brides and bridegrooms, beautiful 
ladies, poets, muses, painters with beards and 
cloaks." 

From these words we turn to Chapter XXXV 
of The Newcomes and find that "J. J. and 
Clive engaged pleasant lofty apartments in the 
Via Gregoriana. Generations of painters had 
occupied these chambers and gone their way. 
The windows of their painting room looked in- 
to a quaint old garden, where there were an- 
cient statues of the Imperial time, a babbling 
fountain and noble orange trees, with broad 
clustering leaves and golden balls of fruit, glo- 
rious to look upon. Their walks abroad were 
endlessly pleasant and delightful. In every 
Street there were scores of pictures of the grace- 
ful, characteristic Italian life. . . . There 
were the children at play, the women huddled 
round the steps in the kindly Roman win- 
ter .. . There came the red troops, the blue 
troops of the army of priests. . . ." How en- 
thusiastically it is all described in Clive's let- 



156 THE SPIRITUAL DRA^IA IN 

ter to his father which is the bulk of the chap- 
ter. 

The visit to Rome was unfortunate in one 
respect for Thackeray took the fever and his 
health which had not been robust since his 
illness in 1849 seems never to have been fully 
restored. Hereafter, we hear of fits of 
"spasms" to which he is subject. 

Soon after he got up from the fever he 
heard of the death of one of his aunts. The 
letter which he wrote, at once, to her daughter 
contains a paragraph that shows how far he 
had come from that futile bitterness of the 
days of his first manner. "So the generations 
of men pass away and are called rank after 
rank by the Divine Goodness out of reach of 
time and age and grief and struggle and part- 
ing, leaving these to their successors, who go 
through their appointed world-work, and are 
resumed presently by the Awful Power of us 
all, Whose will is done on earth as it is in 
heaven, Whose kingdom and glory are forever 
and ever." 

The Thackeray of Vanity Fair — the dreary 
sentimentalist with his everlasting "Which of 
us is happy in this world" — could not have 
written those words and believed them. Even 
as the earlier novel marches ever to that ca- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 157 

dencc of despair, the later one has for its great 
chorus, — His will is done on earth as it is 
in heaven. Thus is measured the distance 
Thackeray has traversed morally since the end 
of his first manner. He summed it up, him- 
self, though with no intention to do so, when 
he wrote about that same time: "So the father 
of all sends illness, death, care, grief, out of 
which come love, steadfastness, consolation, 
nor could these things have been if men had 
not been made mortal, and even erring and 
sinful and wayward. Suppose Eve had not 
eaten of that apple, and her children and their 
papa had gone on living forever quite happy 
in a smiling paradisaical nudity, it wouldn't 
have been half the world it is." 

Thackeray returned North leaving his 
daughters with their grandparents at Paris 
and went on alone to London. He gave up the 
house in Young Street where so much of his 
work had been done and removed to 36 Ons- 
low Square. In April, 1854, he wrote that he 
was well pleased with the new house; he de- 
scribed himself "poking about for furniture, 
. . . leave home at eleven every day and 
don't come back till midnight. I had a fa- 
mous passage and a good dinner and sleep at 
Folkstone, dined at the Shakespeare dinner 



158 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

here on Saturday, and am very glad I came, if 
only that Dickens, who was in the chair, made 
a complimentary speech, and though I don't 
care for the compliments, I do for the good 
will and peace among men. 

"I have been to call on no one, but dining 
with old cronies, companion bachelors. . . ." 

The house in Onslow Square was Thack- 
eray's home for the next seven years and in 
it was written the latter parts of The New- 
comes, the Georges, The Virginians, part of 
Philip and many of the Roundabout Papers. 
"The result of my father's furnishing," says 
Mrs. Ritchie, "was a pleasant bowery sort of 
home with green curtains and carpets looking 
out upon the elm trees of Onslow Square." 

One of the famous anecdotes of Thackeray, 
one of those which really gave us a glimpse 
into his mind, belongs to 1854. A young lady 
who met him at Coventry, whither he had 
gone to lecture on "Charity and Humour,'* 
tells the story thus: 

"He was the Bray's guest and would you 
believe it, they asked me, and me only, to tea, 
to be smuggled in as one of themselves with 
no introduction ... he usually goes to an 
inn, hating to be made a lion of, but the 
Lewes's assured him that the Brays' would not 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 159 

lionise him, and so he accepted the invitation. 
... I met Miss Hennell in the garden, who 
talked in an undertone as if fearful of disturb- 
ing the lion, who was then in his room writ- 
ing the coming number of The Neit/comes, 
and then went into the house anxiously await- 
ing his appearance. . . . 

"At last he came, very quietly, but such a 
presence! We had to look up a long way, he 
was so tall. . . . He talked in a pleasant, 
friendly way. The coming number of The 
Newcomes was of course in all our minds. 
Miss Hennell^ as our spokeswoman, said, 
'Mr. Thackeray, we want you to let Clive 
marry Ethel. Do let them be happy.' He 
was surprised at our interest in his characters. 
What a fuss you make about my yellow 
books, here in the country. In town, no one 
cares for them. They haven't the time. The 
characters once created lead me and I follow 
where they direct. I cannot tell the events 
that wait on Ethel and Clive. . . .' 

*'I was told that next morning when they 
asked him whether he had a good night he 
answered, *How could I with Colonel New- 
come making a fool of himself as he has 
done.' " 

The last line of The Newcomes was written 



160 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

at Paris "one hot summer's day in the Rue 
Godot de Mauroy, in a big shady room look- 
ing toward the street." It was Thackeray's 
custom, at this time, though he dictated much, 
to set down the supreme passages with his own 
hand. **I remember writing the last chapter 
of The Newcomes," says Mrs. Ritchie, "to my 
father's dictation. I wrote on as he dictated 
more and more slowly until he stopped short 
altogether, in the account of Colonel New- 
come's last illness, when he said that he must 
now take the pen into his own hand, and sent 
me away." 

Prophecy is a dangerous business, but I 
would risk a good deal that the novel which 
was finished that "hot summer's day," in the 
year 1855, will, as time goes on, be left with- 
out a rival save Esmond alone for the first 
place in our prose fiction. The handling is 
not quite so brilliant as in its wonderful prede- 
cessor; there is too much digression; the style 
has not the early morning quality of the first 
manner; but, on the other hand, all the vices 
of Thackeray's earlier thinking have disap- 
peared ; and the book has this advantage over 
Esmond that it is positive, where the other 
was negative; it builds upon the ground 
which Esmond has cleared; as to details, the 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 161 

style is pliant and noble, the portraits mas- 
terly, the tone, though grave, both hopeful 
and courageous. When all else has been said 
there remains to clinch the matter the constant 
presence of faith, of the genuine belief that — . 

"God's in his heaven, j 

All's right with the world." / 

To reckon up what had happened in Thack-* 
eray's inner life, to appreciate his transfor- 
mation, we should contrast The Newcomes 
with Vanity Fair. The career of the heroine 
alone contains the whole story of the enormous 
difference between the moods that lie behind 
the two books. Remembering that in Vanity 
Fair sorrow does not work salvation, we are 
almost startled to see how confident, in the , 
later work, is the belief that "the Father of 1 
all sends illness, death, care, grief, out of ' 
which come love, steadfastness, consolation." 
And all this, as I say, is summed up in the 
career of Ethel Newcome. 

We meet her first as a brilliant, lovely, im- 
perious child. She blossoms into a superb 
young beauty. We can all see that at heart 
she is in love with her cousin Clive Newcome, 
who is always in love with her, but Miss 
Ethel, through her mother, is of the world 



162 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

worldly, while her father, Sir Brian, is but 
newly established there and his brother, the 
now so famous old Colonel Newcome, Clive's 
father, is hardly of the world at all. Ethel's 
brother Barnes is a pushing, unscrupulous 
snob; her mother a nonentity; her grand- 
mother Lady Kew, now as famous in her way 
as the Colonel, is the real head of the house. 
A match between Ethel and her cousin the 
Earl of Kew is the goal of old Lady Kew's 
scheming and gets so near to success that the 
two become engaged. Poor Clive takes his 
defeat bravely in the midst of that Baden epi- 
sode which makes upon the reader an effect 
quite as impressive and even more natural 
and convincing — if I may be allowed to say 
so — than the Brussels episode in Vanity Fair. 
The two love stories which run through the 
book — the story of Ethel and Clive and that 
of Clara Pulleyn and Jack Belsize — are en- 
tangled at Baden with the lesser affair of 
Ethel and Kew; with the odious scheming of 
Clara's impoverished but noble family who 
force her to marry Barnes Newcome; and 
with the wiles of the detestable Duchess 
d'lvry who here pays a score against Kew. 
This is the episode of The Congress of Baden, 
told in seven incomparable chapters. It in- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 163 

eludes the breaking of Ethel's engagement due 
to revelations with regard to Kew's past life 
that are slipped into her knowledge through 
the craft of Madame d'lvry. 

Having broken with Kew, whom she knew 
all along she did not love, Ethel flings her- 
self into gaiety and now Thackeray gives us 
the real thing in the way of a splendid flirt. 
She is thus described by Pendennis, who pur- 
ports to be the author of the book. "I must 
tell you that this arch young creature had 
formed the object of my observation for some 
months past, and that I watched her as I have 
watched a beautiful panther at the Zoological 
Gardens, so bright of eye, so sleek of coat, so 
slim in form, so swift and agile in her spring. 

"A more brilliant coquette than Miss New- 
come, in her second season, these eyes have 
never looked upon, that is the truth. In her 
first year, being engaged to Lord Kew, she 
was perhaps a little more reserved and quiet. 
Besides, her mother went out with her that 
first season, to whom Miss Newcome except 
for a little occasional flightiness, was invari- 
ably obedient and ready to come to call. But 
when Lady Kew appeared as her duenna, 
the girl's delight seemed to be to plague the 
old lady, and she would dance with the very 



164, THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

youngest sons merely to put grandmamma in 
a passion. In this way, poor young Clubley 
. . . actually thought that Ethel was in love 
with him. . . . Young Tandy, of the Temple, 
Lord Skibbereen's younger son, who sat in 
the House for some time on the Irish Catholic 
side, . . . would entertain me with his ad- 
miration and passion for her. 

" *If you have such a passion for her, why 
not propose?' it was asked of Mr. Tandy. 

"'Propose! Propose to a Russian arch- 
duchess,' cries young Tandy. 'She's beauti- 
ful, she's delightful, she's witty. I have never 
seen anything like her eyes ; they send me wild 
— wild,' says Tandy (slapping his waistcoat 
under Temple Bar) — 'but a more audacious 
little flirt never existed since the days of 
Cleopatra.' " 

To this girl Clive returns from Rome, — 
where he and J. J. are still trying to be 
painters, — the moment he hears she has broken 
her engagement. And now ensues a long 
period in which, as it seems to me, there is a 
distinct reminiscence of Beatrix and Henry 
Esmond. Clive is not near so bad as the mel- 
ancholy Colonel, but just the same he is not 
quite right. To his great hurt a piece of Es- 
mond has got dissolved in him and therefore 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 165 

Clive Newcome must suffer long before he 
comes to his own. Be this as it may, however, 
he fails with Ethel though her tenderness for 
him is plain to the reader if not to the young 
people themselves and Ethel, who a year be- 
fore flung over Kew because of his morals, 
engages herself to the utterly worthless, but 
enormously rich, young Marquis of Farin- 
tosh. 

At the opening of Chapter LIII we are re- 
minded of an unhappy love affair in the youth 
of Clive's father. "If my gentle reader has 
had sentimental disappointments, he or she is 
aware that the friends who have given him 
most sympathy under these calamities have 
been persons who have had dismal histories 
of their own at some time of their lives and I 
conclude Colonel Newcome in his early days 
must have suffered very cruelly in that affair 
of which we have a slight cognisance, or he 
would not have felt so very much anxiety about 
Clive's condition." This is by way of prelude 
to a furious quarrel between the Colonel and 
his nephew Barnes, who has kept him in the 
dark about Ethel's movements while the old 
man has endeavoured to compass the financial 
side of an alliance with Miss Newcome. By 
this quarrel, the two branches of the family 



160 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

are separated and now the weakness in Clive 
comes out. His poor dear father — of whom 
Robert Louis Stevenson said that if the whole 
race of gentlemen should disappear, the type 
could be restored from this one figure — though 
a beautiful character has a vein of weakness 
which has descended to his son. The Col- 
onel's one love affair was not with Clive's 
mother, who, if truth be told, was not a pleas- 
ant person and married that gentle soldier, in 
his disconsolate early days, after the failure 
of his real love, chiefly by virtue of being his 
superior in will power. In Chapter LVI, we 
see the pitiful side of poor Clive: we see, too, 
how artfully the dreadful Mrs. Mackenzie is 
laying siege to him in his misery for her little 
fool of a Rosy; we wonder whether Clive, like 
his father, like Henry Esmond, will make one 
of those marriages of consolation which 
are so likely before they are done to spell 
ruin. 

Another marriage has meantime gone 
wrong. Clara Pulleyn has found Barnes un- 
endurable and has run off with her old love 
who is now Lord Highgate. This event 
brings Ethel to her senses. Her own marriage 
with the Marquis would have been of the same 
nature as Clara's with Barnes and now the 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 167 

horror of such marriage falls upon her. She 
breaks off her engagement, withdraws from 
society, and spends her time in the country 
taking care of her younger brothers and sisters 
and Barnes' neglected children. The two 
short Chapters LX and LXI contain a second 
general crisis. Laura Pendennis here at- 
tempts to bring Clive back — even as he came 
of his own accord after the break with Kew — 
and not only Laura but every reader of the 
book can see that Ethel has found her heart 
at last and this is Clive's day. But, alas! the 
weak strain in the Newcomes, father and son 
— the Esmond strain — has borne fruit and they 
must pay for it. Laura does not hear of 
Clive's fatal error directly but through a let- 
ter from his father to an old dependent with 
whom Laura and Ethel — who by now are 
great friends — have an interview. Ethel's in- 
terest in this old servant of her uncle's is made 
pointedly suggestive. On that day old Mrs. 
Mason must produce the letter she has just 
received from her dear Colonel and in this 
letter is the news of Clive's marriage with 
Rosy Mackenzie. 

"Keziah must have thought there was some- 
thing between Clive and my wife, for when 
Laura had read the letter she laid it down 



168 THE SPIRITUAL DRAIMA IN 

upon the table and sitting down by it, and 
hiding her face in her hands, burst into tears. 

"Ethel looked steadily at the two pictures 
of Clive and his father. Then she put her 
hand on her friend's shoulder. 'Come, my 
dear,' said she, 'it is growing late and I must 
go back to my children.' And she saluted 
Mrs. Mason and her maid in a very stately 
manner and left them, leading my wife away, 
who was still exceedingly overcome." 

There ensues a period of Ethel's life in 
which she gives herself up to the service of 
others. Not in her is any trace of sentimen- 
talism, of any luxuriating in her sorrows. 
This strong spirit could go wrong deliberately 
as when she engaged herself to Farintosh, 
knowing what she was doing — as Beatrix did 
with Hamilton — but for her the brooding self- 
absorption of Esmond, or Clive's surrender to 
the wiles of a consoler, are impossible. In the 
best vein of the third manner is that Chapter 
LXn in which the story pauses during a grand 
chorus upon the situation of all the persons. 
Here is the account of Ethel. "Her charities 
increased daily with her means of knowing 
the people round about her. She gave much 
time to them and thought; visited from house 
to house without ostentation : was awe-stricken 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 169 

by that spectacle of the poverty, which we have 
with us always, of which the sight rebukes our 
selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels 
us to charity, humility and devotion. . . . 
Death, never dying out; hunger always crying 
and children born to it day after day,^:^our 
young London lady, flying from the splendours 
and follies in which her life had been passed, 
found herself in the presence of these: thread- 
ing darkling alleys which swarmed with 
wretched life; sitting by naked beds, whither 
by God's blessing she was sometimes enabled 
to carry a little comfort and consolation and 
whence she came heart-stricken by the over- 
powering misery, or touched by the patient 
resignation of the new friends to whom fate 
had directed her. And here she met the priest 
upon his shrift, the homely missionary bear- 
ing his words of consolation, the quiet curate 
pacing his round, and was known to all these, 
and was enabled now and again to help their 
people in trouble. 'Oh! what good there is in 
this woman!' my wife would say to me as she 
laid one of Miss Ethel's letters aside: 'who 
would have thought this was the girl of your 
glaring London ballroom? If she has had 
grief to bear, how it has chastened and im- 
proved her!'" 



170 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

The closing quarter of the book is full of 
utter sadness but also of the tenderest faith and 
pity. The miserable married life of Clive 
forms a verdict on the marriage of consola- 
tion — which, when we analyse it, is as selfish 
in its way as the marriage of convenience. 
Clive committed one of these great errors; 
Barnes the other. With equal hand Thack- 
eray weighs them both and finds them wanting. 
And all through this dark part of the story 
Ethel is the ministering angel. There is no 
scene in Thackeray at once so unhappy and so 
tender as the reconciliation of Ethel and her 
uncle, at Clive's house, shortly before Rosy's 
death. Of the death of Colonel Newcome all 
the world knows. 

Again let us turn back to Vanity Fair and 
listen to that tone of hopelessness as the story 
dies away and we see Dobbin "seizing up his 
little Janey, of whom he is fonder than of any- 
thing in the world — fonder even than of his 
History of the Punjaub. 

" 'Fonder than he is of me,' Emmy thinks 
with a sigh. But he never said a word to 
Amelia that was not kind and gentle, or 
thought of a want of hers that he did not try 
to gratify. 

"Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 171 

happy in this world? which of us has his de- 
sire? or having it is satisfied? — Come, chil- 
dren, let us shut up the box and the puppets 
for the play is played out." 

From this beautiful but pernicious writing 
we return to the epilogue of The Newcomes, 
where in such a playful way Thackeray sets 
us at rest about the final happiness of Clive 
and Ethel and after pretending to be uncertain, 
concludes "my belief, then, is that in Fable- 
land somewhere Ethel and Clive are living 
most comfortably together: that she is im- 
mensely fond of his little boy and a great deal 
happier now than they would have been had 
they married at first when they took a liking 
to each other as young people." 

Can this be the Thackeray of Vanity Fair? 
this man who has built up his stupendous 
novel on the theme expressed in those words 
of his own, "the Father of all sends illness, 
death, care and grief out of which come love, 
steadfastness, consolation." Yes, the two are 
the same, or rather the one has died and has 
been resurrected into the other. In this fact is 
the greatness of Thackeray's life as a man — 
that great life whose noble, later mood was 
summed up in the words of a prayer which he 
wrote and showed to a friend who has thus 



172 THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 

preserved it, in part, from memory: "He 
prayed that he might never write a word incon- 
sistent with the love of God or the love of man : 
that he might never propagate his own preju- 
dices or pander to those of others: that he 
might always speak the truth with his pen, and 
that he might never be actuated by a love of 
greed. I particularly remember that the 
prayer wound up with the words: 'For the 
sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.' " 



CHAPTER VIII 

FOLLOWING "THE NEWCOMES " 

WHEREVER we place The New- 
comes as art it was Thackeray's 
greatest success financially, and he 
appears to have derived from it no less than 
£4000. Though this was not a great sum in 
comparison with the sums paid to Dickens, 
it signifies an extended popular interest. 
Thackeray had captured his audience. 

However, he did not allow himself to pause 
in his labours but prepared for another busi- 
ness venture in America. This time his stock 
in trade was the set of lectures on The Four 
Georges. A farewell dinner, with Dickens in 
the chair, was tendered him by sixty friends, 
October 11, 1855. 

Of this second American sojourn there is 
one anecdote that must be told. At Philadel- 
phia "owing to the lateness of the season," his 
lecture was a failure. The person financially 
responsible was a "sad, pale-faced young man," 
who lost money on the venture. Thackeray 

173 



174 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

pitied him to the extent of leaving behind 
sufficient funds to make good his losses. 

This portion of Thackeray's life includes an- 
other curious attempt — the third and last — to 
digress from the plain course of his natural 
fitness. In 1857 he stood for Parliament, as a 
Liberal, at Oxford. As a political speaker he 
is said to have done fairly well — far better 
than one might expect of a man of his tempera- 
ment — and the episode is further remembered 
for a bit of repartee. His opponent, Mr. 
(afterward Lord) Cardwell, meeting Thack- 
eray one day, made the trite remark that he 
hoped the best man would win. ''No," said 
Thackeray, "I hope not." The vote went 
against him, 1,085 to 1,018. He took the de- 
feat gracefully and in a farewell speech de- 
clared that he would retire to his desk and 
"leave to Mr. Cardwell a business that I am 
sure he understands much better than I do." 

He took himself at his word and in Novem- 
ber, 1857, brought out the first number of The 
Virginians. The last number appeared in 
October, 1859. His health was not good and 
may account for the fact that The Virginians 
is not sustained. One episode — Harry War- 
rington at Tunbridge Wells — is done with his 
whole strength. None of the book, is poor. 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 175 

Throughout it shows the sanity, the sweetness 
of his third manner which had flowered so 
splendidly in The Newcomes. Nevertheless, 
as a whole it reveals a distinct, but as events 
proved only a temporary, decline of power. 

A detail of the same period, sadder than the 
lapse of power, was a quarrel with Edmund 
Yates, which widened into a quarrel with 
Dickens, of which scandal-mongers have made 
much. It was all about a silly article by Yates 
describing Thackeray who was so mortified 
that he appealed to the committee of the Gar- 
rick Club on the ground that Yates had made 
use of facts he could not have known except 
as a member of the club. Dickens attempted 
to mediate. He was not successful. Yates 
was forced to leave the club and an estrange- 
ment arose between Thackeray and Dickens 
which lasted several years. It terminated only 
a few days before Thackeray's death when they 
met on the steps of the Athenaeum and 
spontaneously shook hands. 

The events of Thackeray's life subsequent to 
the appearance of The Newcomes culminated 
in the establishment of the Cornhill Magazine 
with Thackeray as its editor. His reputation 
was by now so great that when it was known 
he would edit the new magazine, the report 



176 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

made a literary sensation. The first number, 
January, i860, sold a hundred thousand copies. 

It is said that he intended to open the Corn- 
hill with the first number of a great novel by 
himself but having allowed other matters to in- 
terfere he felt he could not get it in hand and 
therefore, at rather a late hour, called on Trol- 
lope to take his place. His own contribution 
for January, i860, was the first number of 
Lovel the Widower, a slight performance 
which ran only six months. 

However, Thackeray carried out his inten- 
tion after all. In January, 1861, appeared the 
first number of Philip which ran until Au- 
gust, 1862. This book, now so strangely neg- 
lected, is one of his great productions. Many 
people have assumed that it must be poor for 
no reason, apparently, except that when 
Thackeray wrote it he was growing old. Such 
people forget that the Roundabout Papers 
written at this same time are perhaps the 
height of Thackeray as a stylist. How to ac- 
count for the heresy that Philip is a feeble 
work — a "shadow" of the early books, Mr. 
Whibley calls it — is a problem. I can find 
no explanation but the conventional idea that 
a writer like a wave must rise to an apex and 
then decline and hence that his later work 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 177 

must necessarily be poor. Sometimes this is 
true but not always. As to Philip, I main- 
tain that it reaches the very highest pitch of 
comedy Thackeray ever attained. Philip's 
love affair at Paris, and the duel of the brandy 
bottles, transcends the affair of Pen and the 
Fotheringay by just the extent to which the 
wholesomeness of Thackeray's mood in 1861 
exceeded that of 1849. In this comedy there is 
none of the underlying bitterness which, sooner 
or later, for every discerning reader, becomes 
visible through the shimmer of the first man- 
ner and turns its light into darkness. The 
comedy of Philip is pure wholesome laughter 
issuing from the conviction that God knows 
what he is about with his world, and there- 
fore his creatures may be merry even in their 
misfortunes; that if they but keep their cour- 
age up all things will at last work together 
for good. 

It is a fortunate coincidence that Thack- 
eray's third manner, like his first, closes with 
a novel on youth. The careers of Arthur 
Pendennis and Philip Firmin are, so far as 
mere events go, wonderfully alike. Who 
knows the story of one, knows in the main the 
story of the other. And yet no books by the 
same hand were ever further apart. Pen- 



178 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

dermis for all its external brilliancy is worm- 
eaten at the core. Philip is a ripe apple, 
beautiful without and sound within. 

The remaining events of Thackeray's life 
may be briefly told. He was editor of the 
Cornhill until March, 1862, when he resigned. 
According to report he was not a successful 
editor. He appears to have lacked system in 
his work and also was too soft hearted with 
poor contributors who needed money. The 
hardship of editing, as he conceived it, was the 
necessity to reject the work of the unfortunate. 
In his essay, Thorns in the Cushion he makes 
a humorous confession of how hard he found 
the task. With the successful people of letters 
he had no compunctions. Both Trollope and 
Mrs. Browning received rejections at his hands 
because of their subject matter, Thackeray as- 
serting that the contributions in question would 
offend the public. 

In February, 1862, Thackeray moved into a 
house which he had built — 2 Palace Green, 
Kensington — in the wall of which there is now 
a memorial tablet. At the house warming, on 
the twenty-fourth of the month, his attempt at 
a play. The Wolves and The Lamb, was acted 
by amateurs, Thackeray appearing at the end 
of the performance to say a "God bless you" 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 179 

in pantomime. He lived in this house nearly 
two years. Though not rich he closed his 
life in prosperity and Sir Leslie Stephen says 
that his receipts from the Cornfiill amounted 
to 4,000 pounds yearly. Trollope says: "A 
little before his death, Thackeray told me that 
he had succeeded in replacing the fortune 
which he had lost as a young man. He had, 
in fact, done better, for he left an income of 
seven hundred and fifty pounds behind him." 
He was found dead in his bed on the morn- 
ing of the day before Christmas, 1863. He 
had been ailing for some time and the night 
previous had gone to bed early saying he was 
not well. The immediate cause of death was 
an effusion into the brain. Thackeray was 
buried January 30, in the cemetery at Kensal 
Green. A bust of him, by Marochetti, was 
speedily set up in Westminster. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE FINAL TRIUMPH 

ELEVATED as The Newcomes is in 
moral tone Thackeray went above it 
in the novel which he left unfinished 
— the splendid fragment of Denis Duval. 
In The Newcomes, though it is one of those 
few great works of art whose fundamental mo- 
tive is the acquisition of faith, we are still 
aware of the struggle that has led up to the 
faith. The battle is over but the roar of it 
still rings in our ears, the horror of it still lives 
in our nerves. In Denis Duval the very- 
memory of the battle has been put aside: we 
are set securely upon a pinnacle whence we 
view the entire field of Life and behold all the 
parts of it related in a single design, the mean- 
ing of which is that His will is done on earth 
as it is in heaven. 

This intention to insist upon the final right- 
ness of Life afifects the method of telling the 
story. Like Esmond it is an autobiography 
but unlike Esmond it assures us at the start 

i8o 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 181 

that however dark may be the shadows 
through which if we follow it we must jour- 
ney, the end of all will be happiness. Ad- 
miral Duval, sitting down to the composition 
of his memoirs, reveals himself as a serene, 
humorous old gentleman who can look upon 
his troubled past with a contented smile. 
Mentioning little Agnes, whom he knew as a 
child, he adds: 

"And who, pray, was Agnes? To-day her 
name is Agnes Duval and she sits at her work- 
table hard by. The lot of my life has been 
changed by knowing her. To win such a prize 
in life's lottery is given but to very few. 
What I have done (of any worth) has been 
done in trying to deserve her." The admiral 
is a risen man sprung from a plain stock and 
this gives point to his next sentence: "I might 
have remained, but for her, in my humble na- 
tive lot, to be neither honest nor happy, but 
that my good angel yonder succoured me. All 
I have I owe to her; but I pay with all I have, 
and what creature can do more?" 

These sentences close the first chapter and 
form the keynote of the book. The ideas con- 
tained in them arc the chorus to which the 
whole event moves. Thackeray is now secure 
in his faith that Life is right at bottom; that 



182 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

no good is ever lost out of life but somewhere 
in some way bears fruit; that Love is the su- 
preme fact, and the secret of Love is not to 
get but to give. Fifteen years before, when 
Thackeray drew Dobbin and Amelia, he had 
not learned that lesson. In those days of 
his bitterness he could say that Dobbin should 
get Amelia and find when he had got her that 
she was not worth having. At the back of 
his mind was still the unconverted pagan con- 
ception of Love — that it is a game played for 
a stake and that it is worth while or the re- 
verse according as the stake won comes up 
to, or falls below, the expectation of the 
gamester. This conception of Love is one 
element in that natural man who must die to 
the spiritual man in order to get a true un- 
derstanding of the words — "Greater love than 
this hath no man that he lay down his life for 
his friend." 

Remembering Dobbin and Amelia mar- 
ried; remembering the fifteen years, the sor- 
row, the struggle, the victory, that separate 
Vanity Fair from Denis Duval; we under- 
stand why Thackeray slips into the second 
chapter, after the admiral has been comment- 
ing on Agnes' childhood, this paragraph: 

"That daughter is sitting before me now — 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 183 

with spectacles on nose too — very placidly 
spelling the Portsmouth paper where I hope 
she will soon read the promotion of Monsieur 
Scapegrace, her son. She has exchanged her 
noble name for mine which is only humble 
and honest. My dear! your eyes are not so 
bright as once I remember them, and the 
raven locks are streaked with silver. To 
shield thy head from dangers has been the 
blessed chance and duty of my life. When I 
turn towards her, and see her moored in our 
harbour of rest, after our life's checkered voy- 
age, calm and happy, a sense of immense grati- 
tude fills my being, and my heart says a hymn 
of praise." 

When the melancholy Colonel Esmond sat 
down to the composition of his memoirs, he 
also, revealed his mood at the beginning. The 
contrast between the stout old admiral and the 
Knight of the Rueful Countenance is worth 
observing. "I have seen too much of suc- 
cess in life," says the Colonel, in his sour 
loftiness, "to take off my hat and huzza as it 
passes in its gilt coach ... Is it the Lord 
Mayor going in state to mince pies and the 
Mansion House? Is it poor Jack of New- 
gate's procession, with the sheriff and javelin 
men conducting hi mon his last journey to Ty- 



184 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

burn? I look into my heart and think I am 
as good as my Lord Mayor, and know I am as 
bad as Tyburn Jack. Give me a chain and a 
red gown and a pudding before me, and I 
could play the part of alderman very well, 
and sentence Jack after dinner. Starve me, 
keep me from books and honest people, edu- 
cate me to love dice, gin and pleasure, and put 
me on Hounslow Heath with a purse before 
me and I will take it. And 'I shall be de- 
servedly hanged,' say you, wishing to put an 
end to this prosing. I don't say no. I can't 
but accept the world as I find it, including a 
rope's end, as long as it is in the fashion." 

We can imagine the satisfaction with which 
Esmond, the everlasting poser, who could 
never cease from acting a part before himself, 
penned those words. In his shallow mind 
they were a stately condescension to the frail- 
ties of mankind. And what an attitude he 
struck when he wrote them ! Did he not show 
his superiority by deigning to include himself 
in this railing accusation which he masks with 
a smile? So he thinks; so he expects the 
world to think. And we must admit that it 
is a seductive philosophy, — this notion that we 
are all the victims of circumstances, that our 
conditions and not ourselves, must bear the 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 185 

blame, as well as take the credit, both for our 
evil and our good. That philosophy is the 
key to Esmond's life. It was, also, to a great 
extent, the key to the century in which the au- 
thor of Esmond lived, which he expressed 
more truly than did any of his rivals. What 
the creation of Hamlet was to the Renais- 
sance — the supreme expression of its source of 
danger — that, allowing for the difference be- 
tween Shakespeare and Thackeray, the crea- 
tion of Esmond has been to our own time. 
We have seen how, in Thackeray, the expres- 
sion of the danger was the means of deliver- 
ance from it; how he passed on, his work of 
destruction being accomplished, and reared 
anew the spiritual world. The Newcomes — 
fantastic as this assertion may appear to some 
— is the epic of the recovery by the modern 
world of the sense of faith. In Denis Duval, 
had Thackeray lived to finish it, we should 
have had a serene presentment of the new 
heaven and the new earth after all the turmoil 
of the night time had been lost in pure dawn. 
In this connection especial significance at- 
taches to the character of the clergyman, Dr. 
Bernard. That scene, in the fourth chapter 
of Denis Duval where the doctor refuses to 
take the hand of the Chevalier de le Motte, is 



186 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

one of Thackeray's master-strokes. It should 
be set over against the first chapter of the 
second book of Henry Esmond as a contrast 
between conviction and sentimentality. The 
old clergyman, kind and fearless, but com- 
manding, sees life clearly, and estimates people 
correctly, chiefly through expelling himself 
from his calculations. Consequently, he can 
act with a decisive firmness that hits the true 
solution of every case. Where it is right to 
be so, he is as gentle as a woman; and where 
it is not, he is, in every sense, a man. 

To get the full measure of the contrast we 
must turn again to Esmond who, never being 
able to view a situation without himself at the 
centre of it, could not ever raise a pure ques- 
tion of right or wrong. Few things in any 
novelist are more subtle than the way in which 
Thackeray makes Esmond reveal and con- 
demn himself in his meditations following 
Castlewood's duel. His patron, who has just 
told him the secret of his birth, lies dying. 
What shall Esmond do? Shall he accept the 
paper in which the poor Lord makes confes- 
sion, or shall he destroy it and let Castlewood 
die happy thinking that his son shall succeed 
him? The situation, since Henry Esmond is 
under such deep obligation to Castlewood, is 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 187 

indeed a hard one. What was right for 
Henry to do was a delicate question which 
Thackeray skilfully evades. He centres our 
attention, not on what Esmond did, but on 
the reasons for which he did it. Here again 
we have a case of that masterly blending of 
good and bad, courage and weakness, which is 
so characteristic of this subtlest of novelists 
when entirely in his own vein. Esmond's rea- 
sons are all so plausible that at first blush it 
is hard to find fault with any of them and not 
feel that we condemn ourselves. And yet, if 
we pause and observe him closely, we perceive, 
at the back of all his thoughts, this one ques- 
tion : How shall I feel if I do this? That is 
what brands Henry Esmond as the supreme 
sentimentalist. He acts, at bottom, not from 
a desire to do right, not from any passion of 
sacrifice, nor from a sense of obligation that 
will sternly pay its debt at whatever cost, but 
from a dread of his own sensibilities; he is 
afraid that if he does otherwise his sensibili- 
ties will come back upon him, he will be mis- 
erable. Of course, he does not admit this — 
nor any part of it — not even to himself. We 
see into his mind, but he cannot. Sentimen- 
talism and truth exclude each other. So it 
happens that Henry instantly lards his motives 



188 THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA IN 

over with a great to-do about gratitude, sym- 
pathy, indifference to the world, the sense of 
honour. Again, we must remember that there 
is no question here of the right or wrong of 
his act. All that has been swallowed up in 
the revealed falseness of his motive. 

In the fourth chapter of Denis Duval there 
was a chance for just this sort of a perform- 
ance, but Dr. Bernard bore himself in pre- 
cisely the opposite way. After reading that 
chapter — no matter whether we praise or con- 
demn his action: let that point be waived as 
completely as in Esmond — We know that 
never in connection with any action did the 
Doctor ask himself: hoin) shall I feel if I do 
this? 

The man who was always asking himself 
that question thought of human life as the 
toy of a malign fate and laid every wrong upon 
circumstance. The man who never asked him- 
self that question — or, at least, never allowed 
himself to be swayed by it — was once the 
means of saving Denis from a false accusation 
after which he revealed his point of view very 
simply. Here is the admiral's account: 

" 'Come along with me, Denny,' says the 
Doctor, taking me by the shoulder: and he led 
me away and we took a walk in the town to- 



THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 189 

gether. And as we passed old Ypres Tower, 
which was built by King Stephen, they say, 
and was a fort in old days, but is used as the 
town prison now, 'Suppose you had been 
looking from behind those bars now, Denny, 
and awaiting your trial at assizes? Yours 
would not have been a pleasant plight,' Dr. 
Barnard said. 

" 'But I was innocent, sir! You know I 
wasl' 

" 'Yes. Praise be where praise is due. But 
if you had not providentially been able to 
prove your innocence — if you and your friend 
Parrot had not happened to inspect your box, 
you would have been in yonder place. Ha! 
There is the bell ringing for afternoon service, 
which my good friend Dr. Wing keeps up. 
What say you? Shall we go and — and — offer 
up our thanks, Denny — for the — the immense 
peril from which — you have been — de- 
livered?' 

"I remember how my dear friend's voice 
trembled as he spoke, and two or three drops 
fell from his kind eyes on my hand, which he 
held. I followed him into the church. In- 
deed and indeed I was thankful for my deliver- 
ance from a great danger, and even more 
thankful to have the regard of a true gentle- 



190 THE LIFE OF THACKERAY 

man^ the wise and tender friend, who was 
there to guide, and cheer, and help me. 

"As we read the last psalm appointed for 
that evening service, I remember how the 
good man bowing his own head, put his hand 
upon mine, and we recited together the psalm 
of thanks to the Highest, who had had respect 
unto the lowly, and who had stretched forth 
his hand upon the furiousness of my enemies, 
and whose right hand had saved me." 

The whole of Denis Duval is in the tone 
of this passage. For pure and elevated 
thought; for serene faith; for the conviction 
that no good is ever lost; that life, at heart, 
is both right and beautiful: in all these re- 
spects this magnificent fragment towers above 
the novels of its time like the central peak of 
a great range. It is pleasant to know that 
Thackeray's greatest rival appreciated this 
wonderful fragment, that Dickens said of it: 
"In respect of earnest feeling, far-seeing pur- 
pose, character, incident, and a certain loving 
picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe 
Denis Duval to be much the best of his works." 



CHRONOLOGY OF 

THE MAIN EVENTS OF THACKERAY'S LIFE 

1811, July 18, born at Calcutta. 
181 7, sent to England. 
1822, entered Charterhouse. 

1828, left Charterhouse. 

1829, February, entered Cambridge. 

1830, left Cambridge. 

, spent several months at Weimar. 

1 83 1, entered the Middle Temple. 

1833, bought "The National Standard." 

1834, failure of the "Standard." 
, settled at Paris to study art. 

1836, Flore et Zephyr appeared. 

, August 20, married Isabella Gethin Creagh Shawe. 

, Paris correspondent of "The Constitutional." 

1837, July, "The Constitutional" Failed. 

1838, Yellow plush appeared in "Eraser's Magazine." 
1839-40, Catherine ran in "Eraser's." 

1840, Mrs. Thackeray's insanity appeared. 

1 841, The Great Hoggarly Diamond. 

1842, Thackeray began contributing to "Punch." 

1846, February 28, first of the Snob Papers in "Punch." 

1847, January, first number of Vanity Fair. 
, October, last of the Snob Papers. 

1848, July, last number of Vanity Fair. 
, November, first number of Pendennis. 

191 



192 CHRONOLOGY 

1850, December, last number of Pendennis. 

1 85 1, February 25, elected to the Athanaeum Club. 
, May 22, first of the original course of lectures on 

the English Humorists. 
) J'uly 3» last (sixth) lecture of the course. 

1852, Esmond published. 

, Autumn, sailed for America. 

1853, Spring, returned from America. 

, October, first number of The Newcomes. 

1855, August, last number of The Newcomes. 

, October, sailed for America to deliver the lectures 

on The Four Georges. 

1856, April, returned from America. 

1857, July, defeated at Oxford, as Liberal candidate 

for Parliament. 

, November, first number of The Virginians. 

1859, October, last number of The Virginians. 

i860, January, began editing the " Cornhill Magazine." 

, — — , first number of Lovel the Widower, in the 

"Cornhill." 

, first of the Roundabout Papers. 

, June, last number of Lovel the Widower. 

1 86 1, January, first number of Philip in the "Cornhill." 

1862, April, resigned his editorship. 
, August, last number of Philip. 

1863, vi^orked upon Denis Duval. 

, November, last of the Roundabout Papers. 

, December 24, died. 







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